Reviews

Review of When The Actor Inspired Chaos and Bloodshed in Literary Titan

In its 5-star review of the novel When The Actor Inspired Chaos and Bloodshed, Literary Titan, a prominent U.S.-based literary publication, writes: “Litchfield knows how to throw you into a scene. The opening prologue, where a film shoot goes violently sideways, hits hard. Bullets flying, blood spraying, a screaming film exec belly-flopping for cover. It reads like some grainy ’90s action flick at 2 a.m. on cable. That’s the vibe throughout the novel: high tension, slapstick disaster, and sharp edges everywhere. Dominic, caught in the madness, isn’t exactly likable, but he is interesting. He’s the kind of mess you want to keep watching, even when he’s making every wrong choice.”

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Fading Ink

I started writing for newspapers over thirty years ago, and my byline was Nick Litchfield. Dozens of articles and thousands of copies landed on doorsteps nationwide. I kept at it for years, and the way newspapers were syndicated, articles were fed into different sister papers across neighboring towns and counties. Some were weeklies, some dailies.

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Featured book cover image of When The Actor Inspired Chaos and Bloodshed in The Star

The Star newspaper reviews When The Actor Inspired Chaos and Bloodshed

My second novel, When The Actor Inspired Chaos and Bloodshed, is scheduled for release on April 1st. Today, The Star, sometimes known as the Sheffield Star, carried a wonderful review of the novel. “Litchfield’s intense and topical drama sizzles like charred meat over hot coals, eventually erupting into a massive blaze of mesmerising chaos,” book critic Pam Norfolk writes. “Amidst the thrills and spills, readers encounter a cast of well-defined characters whose actions and voices manage to rise above the risible film script. Fans of edge-of-the-seat thrillers filled with exotic settings, non-stop action, and a cast of ambitious artistes battling fears, egos, insecurities, and daily disasters, will relish Nicholas Litchfield’s pulse-pounding novel, When The Actor Inspired Chaos and Bloodshed.”

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Fools Walk In / So Wicked My Love by Bruno Fischer with an introduction by Nicholas Litchfield

Bruno Fischer’s Wicked Fools

This month, Stark House Press reissued two of Fischer’s paperback originals from the Fifties—Fools Walk In, published in 1951, and So Wicked, My Love, from 1954. The novels are essentially two variations on a theme. The first is a bizarre and twisty drama wherein a college professor gets involved with a gang of thieves, and the latter is a powerful and extremely well-written love story with darkness and villainy at its core. My essay, “Fischer’s Foolish Teacher and the Wicked Redhead,” introduces the collection.

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Review of Bandit Heaven by Tom Clavin

In Bandit Heaven, published by St. Martin’s Press last month, New York Times bestselling author Tom Clavin offers an interesting analysis of three secluded hideouts nestled in Wyoming and Utah that for many decades provided a place of refuge and protection for hordes of robbers, killers, and fugitives. These hangouts—Robbers Roost, Brown’s Hole, and Hole-in-the-Wall—sufficiently

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Silent Light by Mark Jacobs

Litchfield reviews Silent Light by Mark Jacobs for the Colorado Review

My review of Mark Jacobs’ literary fiction novel Silent Light was published this week in the Colorado Review. Here is a snippet: “In this epic journey through brutalized, fractured communities within the Democratic Republic of the Congo, award-winning writer Mark Jacobs presents an intense and poignant novel of vulnerable outsiders at the peripheries of hell navigating inter-ethnic quarrels,

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A Séance for Wicked King Death by Coy Hall

Review of A Séance for Wicked King Death by Coy Hall

Coy Hall’s largely overlooked series opener, A Séance for Wicked King Death, published by Shotgun Honey Books last November, is an engrossing 1950s crime story that flaunts scrupulously distilled prose and memorable rogues. Set in Cincinnati, Ohio, and Huntington, West Virginia, it introduces Royce Pembrook, a smart, articulate ex-con with a talent for deception. A

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Review of Joey Piss Pot by Charlie Stella

The heavily populated saga, involving a shady FBI operation, lies, deceit, misplaced trust, and numerous vendettas, requires intricate plotting and careful attention to character. Many have said it before, but there’s a blunt realism to Stella’s dialogue and a compelling rationale for his underworld characters’ pitiless behavior. Richard Lipez writes in an article in The Washington Post: “It’s too bad that virtually none of Stella’s best dialogue is repeatable in this newspaper. Like “The Sopranos” writers, Stella is a kind of obscene Ring Lardner, finding a lean, rancid poetry in his characters’ vernacular, and rendering it with flawless precision and humor.” With Joey Piss Pot, the prose is spare, the conversation sharp and colorful and thick with profanity, and when the action kicks in, the slick, graphic violence leaves a mark. Fans of underworld fiction will drink this up and hungrily hold out their bowl for more.

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The Philosopher Stories by Jerry Levy

The impressive The Philosopher Stories, published a few months ago, is the third story collection from Canadian writer Jerry Levy. As with his 2020 collection, The Quantum Theory of Love and Madness, it’s released by the independent publisher Guernica Editions. Dissimilarity, this book might almost pass as a novel.

Segmented into twelve stories, it covers the ever-interesting ups and downs of Karl Pringle, an intelligent, socially awkward outsider “full of contradictions and insecurities, carrying around an entire Louis Vuitton set of heavy baggage.” A voracious reader, aspiring writer, philosopher, and guru, he’s also a slovenly layabout incapable of holding down a job.

His life takes a downward spiral when he’s thrown out of college for assaulting his professor, and a succession of poor decisions and disappointments push him further into the abyss. But then he’s thrown a lifeline when he meets the joyful and inquisitive Solange, a French woman in her thirties looking for love. Suddenly, there’s hope and a world of possibilities. But Levy’s narrative never goes in the direction you imagine it will, and maybe that’s just as well.

Articulate and original, The Philosopher Stories is an imaginative, thought-provoking pleasure that’s filled with equal parts humor and pathos.

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