Tag: book review

Book Reviews

The Smurl Haunting – A Review by Levi Hill

Lisa Tomey-Zonneveld

by Maxim W. Furek 

This is a guest post for the book review of The Smurl Haunting, Independently Published (2025) as reviewed by Levi Hill. 

It is clear Maxim W. Furek has forgotten more about the occult and paranormal than most people will ever know, and his 176-page joyride through some of most prominent paranormal cases of famed ghosthunters and demonologists Ed and Lorraine Warren is a testament to that fact. 
At first, it may not be clear to casual readers the picture Mr. Furek is painting as he tours us through some of the Warrens’ most famous cases. But his detours into events connect to those cases and glimpses into the lives of some of the most prolific and horrific mass murderers of our time are all leading the uninitiated and open-minded to the Smurl House haunting.

Was the Smurl haunting a genuine demonic event or simply another stopping off point on the impressive literary and cinematic empire the Warren’s gathered around themselves? Were the Warrens indeed spiritual warriors fighting an incorporeal battle with the forces of evil, or clever charlatans capitalizing on the world’s fascination with the ethereal as their detractors contend?

The reader can decide for themselves and Furek has given them plenty to consider before they make up their minds. 
If you’re not every-day-familiar with the other-worldly, Mr. Furek’s book is a solid stepping off point into the vast and terrifying world of the paranormal and is sure to give the reader plenty of dark alleyways to venture down as they delve deeper into the world of the occult. 

If you’re a devotee of the demonic and supernatural, you may not find much in Furek’s book that you probably haven’t already brushed up against on a cold, dark night surfing the paranormal backwaters of the Internet but who knows what specter may linger yet undiscovered?
Whether new to the field of paranormal investigations, or a seasoned veteran of cemetery seances, Furek’s book is a quick and interesting delve into the Ed and Lorraine mythos and sure to leave the reader hungering for more. 

Levi Hill
Jal, New Mexico
Oct. 15, 2025.
Levi Hill is a 20-year veteran, award-winning journalist. He grew up in southeast New Mexico in a haunted house and has had multiple paranormal experiences. He writes an ongoing outdoors column and a series of stories focusing on hauntings in his local area.
Announcements, Book Announcements, Podcasts, Poets & Events, writing

ANNOUNCEMENT! “Cancer Courts My Mother” by LindaAnn LoSchiavo is Now Available

Lisa Tomey-Zonneveld 
Defying expectations, a caregiver’s journey is told as a story of adultery.
   In "Cancer Courts My Mother" by LindaAnn LoSchiavo, disease becomes a Casanova.
Book Awards:
Winner of . . . .
Award nomination: The Brew Awards, nominee, The Chrysalis BREW Project
Award nomination: CLMP’s Firecracker Award

In "Cancer Courts My Mother," a daughter becomes caregiver to her
abusive, soul-scorching mother, discovering that tending to the dying can unexpectedly
heal the living. In this intimate drama, cancer plays Casanova—a relentless suitor
determined to steal a mother from her family.
Essence: Defying expectations, a caregiver’s journey is told as a story of adultery.
In "Cancer Courts My Mother" by LindaAnn LoSchiavo, disease becomes a
Casanova.
Death ends a life but memories hang on.

Haiku Summary:

Cancer’s intrusions
cannot prevent lifelong wounds
from healing

Advanced Acclaim:

When an adult child becomes caretaker for a parent with cancer, family dynamics shift
profoundly. In “Cancer Courts My Mother,” LindaAnn LoSchiavo captures this complex
journey through poetry that balances tenderness with brutal honesty. She navigates
caregiving’s challenges with grace, inviting readers to witness the delicate interplay of
love and fear while portraying her mother as a fully realized, complex human being. The
journey isn’t pretty—sometimes the words are fierce—but this collection digs deep into
universal experiences of loss and care.
― Kellie Scott Reed, Poetry Editor, Roi Fainéant(USA)

In “Cancer Courts My Mother,” LindaAnn LoSchiavo chronicles an emotional journey
through varied poetic forms. She weaves a metaphor of nurturing plants back to life
while her mother finds remission, then faces cancer’s return. The collection reconciles
memories of a difficult mother with the current, vulnerable one—”Bad memories are
cadavers that refuse burial.” As both subject and narrator, LoSchiavo illuminates the
delicate balance between personal autonomy and familial duty.
― Karen Cline-Tardiff, poet and Editor-in-Chief of Gnashing Teeth Publishing
(USA)

Real and harried, purposeful and comprehensive, when understanding is sought and
reason is not always kind, “Cancer Courts My Mother” provides readers with great
measures of meaning.
― Matt Potter, Editor-in-Chief of Pure Slush Publishing (Australia) and
author of “Hamburgers and Berliners”

Peter Mladinic’s Review

Remembering Remission Christmas

They’d bickered over her like two suitors:
Vitality, her birthright, who had known
My mother well before her married life,
And Cancer, who’d mapped out his own terrain,
Unravelled secret strands of resistance,
Until oncologists chased him away.

Remission Christmas reunited us,
Our joy like steam escaping after frost.

I shipped my gifts to Florida ahead:
Biscotti, pignola cookies, torrone
From Little Italy, fine leather goods,
And for her green thumb, a red amaryllis.

But Safety Harbor’s Gulf of Mexico,
Producing Christmastime’s Cancerian
Heat in December, had confused this bulb.

Amidst the presents and nativity,
Its empty cradle strewn with straw, green life
Ripped up gay mummy wrapping, and tore loose,
Unhampered by its ground like Lazarus
Unbound. My parents, unprepared for ghosts
Of miracles, became unnerved by sounds
Newborn right by their crèche, the fir tree’s base,
Invisible and inexplicable
Like faith. Or like remission. After Mass,
They found a determined amaryllis, force
Which sleeps but cannot die, that mother took to heart.

LindaAnn LoSchiavo

Order Your Copy Today

While you are waiting for your copy to arrive, enjoy this interview with the lovely LindaAnn LoSchiavo

Book Reviews, books, poetry

Peter Mladinic’s Book Review of “Cancer Courts My Mother” by LindaAnn LoSchiavo

Lisa Tomey-Zonneveld

Home Remedies: a review of Cancer Courts My Mother by LindaAnn LoSchiavo. Prolific Pulse Press. Raleigh, NC. November 2025

It would be hard to find a person whose life, directly or indirectly, has not been touched by cancer. Just as cancer takes many forms, people’s mental, emotional, and physical responses vary. LindaAnn LoSchiavo’s response is this book. Out of ugliness, the frightful fact cancer kills, she has wrought beauty, this sequence of poems. A reader’s appreciation of them may be heightened by taking a look at their metaphorical resonance and their distinction between honesty and artifice; and, ultimately, by considering the voice of the poet, a daughter speaking about her parents.

The book’s title Cancer Courts My Mother suggests an extended metaphor. The tenor, cancer, is a suitor. A suitor is defined as a man who courts a woman.  Although the title suggests otherwise, the woman the suitor courts is the daughter, the poet. In “Arrival” she says, “I know he’s made himself at home, the dark prince …conveying her into his sunless realm.” Yes, death is conveying the mother but it’s daughter who knows. And she is the one being courted, the one who hears the dark prince’s seductive whispers, the one for whom “terminal illness / twirls out of the speech of men.” At the end of “Tick Tick” she says, “Cancer, biding his time, taunts me.” In “Early Visit from the Grim Reaper,” “His baritone commanded me to GO!” In the “Bartering with Cancer,” the octave begins with “When medicine has nothing more to give / There’s only daughters and morphine…” And in the turn, the second half, she says, “I’m stunned.” In “Jaundice,” she says, “my mother wound up with him —Cancer —,” but in the realm of life, cancer courts the daughter, the maker of these poems.

They are interesting for their distinction between fact and fiction, honesty and artifice. Interesting, compelling, haunting. “Diagnosis” begins the sequence. Its abrupt enjambments signal an urgency that inclines the speaker towards artifice.

Transformation’s required, starting with your voice,
Hemorrhaging with euphemisms, lies. You could
Be an actor fed fake dialogue, words almost
A well-rehearsed performance. You could be-
Come an acrobat, clutching the girders of hope. A
Safety net’s missing. The laughter is a ghost’s.

The abiding artifice is the poems.

Even imagination threatened to betray
me, failing to make good on the fancies I’d hope to invent.
But pen and paper became the dependable parents I’d
always longed for. With them, I sketched realities I could
eventually escape to.

That passage is the conclusion of “Mother Magnified,” which is an honest account of the friction between the speaker and her mother, one aspect of this mother and daughter relationship. Yet another realm of reality, that not only counters the artifice “an actor fed fake dialogue” but also the wooing of “the dark prince” is the life of plants.  In “Green Nursemaid” the daughter tends her mother’s plants, “suturing new healthiness into the exhausted potting mixture.” While other flourishes of artifice appear in the forms of mythic “mermaids” and the “prayer candles” of religious ritual, the plants symbolize continual life, and, in “Living through the Dying,” which begins with the imperative “Resuscitate the wilted,” their tenacity and the poet’s.

To consider the voice in the poems is to consider the speaker, a poet facing the grim reality that many of her reading audience have faced or will face: cancer kills. The poet’s mother’s suffering is terminal; then there’s her father’s suffering and her own. Her voice, what is said, and how, reflects the human heart in conflict with itself. Signs that say Fuck Cancer are brandished by people who hate the thing that is killing their love ones. I love, I hate —they suggest, conveying that conflict. The poet’s “realities” she “could escape to” suggests her speaking, and putting pen to paper is cathartic. She is also defiant. In “Early Visit …” the reaper says, “GO! She says “No!” 

Cancer Courts My Mother consists of poems in free verse and in tradition forms. While its rhymes resolve, there is no closure; the poet’s turmoil remains. Cancer took her mother. A mother’s suffering and eventual absence, left a daughter and a spouse/ father to grieve. The poet’s grief is poignantly conveyed throughout this sequence. Towards the end she says, “When my mother died, she took home along with her.”

Order “Cancer Courts My Mother”

Peter Mladinic was born and raised in New Jersey. He graduated from the University of Minnesota in 1973 and earned an MFA in Creative Writing at the University of Arkansas in 1985. Professor emeritus at New Mexico Junior College, where he was a member of the English faculty for thirty years. During that time, he was a board member of the Lea County Museum and president of the Lea County Humane Society. He is the author of several poetry collections.