Latest Posts

Solve the World by Dante Stack - Book Tour + Giveaway

By 9:00 AM , , , , , , , , , , , ,


Solve the World
Part One
by Dante Stack

Genre:
YA Dystopian Adventure 

Young Jennifer Dash leaves her Louisiana home in search of the key to life.
Her quest begins humbly enough amidst the swamps of the Pelican
state, but forces beyond her control will propel her past many
nations, oceans, cultures, and fairy tales... to the very limits of
reason and myth itself. Written as an adventure saga, what begins in
a whimper is destined to end with a bang.
In Part One, you'll be submerged into a maelstrom of underground mobs,
charming love interests, mythical sea monsters, religious theme
parks, and relentless adventure.
Prepare yourself. It's going to be a bumpy ride.
Beware the Pied Piper.

**Get it FREE!!**


Solve the World
Part Two

Young Jennifer Dash left her home with ambition. She wanted to discover the
purpose of life. Big stuff. But a crazy truck driver, an underground
homeless society, and a Catholic theme park with a secret kept Jenn
distracted. Now she's finally on the right path. She's joined the
crew of the adventure schooner Orion, a ship of scientific geniuses
bent on discovering the deepest truths of reality.

Will Jenn find what she's looking for? Or will the madness of a few turn
her world upside down?
Long is the way and hard, that out of darkness, leads into light.

Continue the journey. Beware the Pied Piper.






Solve the World
Part Three


The world is broken. Can we unbreak it?

Jennifer Dash is hunting for a way to fix the world, and herself. From
Fox-masks, to secret orphan bunkers, to a New Zealand skyscraper
culling, to a ravenous Wendigo, this third part of Jenn's harrowing
adventure takes her past the boundaries of science, and straight into
the dragon's lair of mythological nightmares. Can Jenn solve the
world before Leviathan awakes?

Continue the Journey.
Beware the Pied Piper.





13 Pieces of Art that Feel Like Log Flume Rides

Sometimes I don't understand stuff. Well, I guess maybe most of the time I don't understand what's going on... hmm... it's probably fair to say that at a very fundamental level, I don't understand much of anything.

So with that in mind, here's my list of stuff that makes me feel like I'm just floating along waiting for the next curve to throw me somewhere I couldn't quite visualize, but somehow knew had to come nevertheless. These are things that don't necessarily have twist endings or all together outlandish plots (though they may), but they somehow leave me feeling like everything was preordained this way, and yet, I had no idea that it was preordained quite like this.

Anyway, perhaps the list will make more sense than this intro... but then again, if the point is that I don't understand stuff, then why should I be very good at explaining that?


13
A Serious Man
directed by the Coen Brothers
film

A Serious Man prides itself on the activity of passivity. Our humble protagonist wins us over by his sheer confusion at every step of the game. Is God a master puppeteer, or is Professor Larry Gopnik somehow making decisions that twist into these strange consequences? Is life a series of non sequiturs, or is the tapestry just too complex to perceive?

12
Memnoch the Devil
by Anne Rice
novel

What's up, what's down? It's the history of creation, salvation, damnation, all told from the perspective of a fallen angel. The world is inside out. The world is upside down!


11
The Films of Director Terry Gilliam
film

I don't feel like much needs to be said here. Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. 12 Monkeys. Brazil. The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus. But for my money, the log flumiest of the lot, and subsequently worst, is Tideland. Here, we get swept into a disturbing world that alternately makes no sense, and is no fun. Wonderland never followed Aristotle's rules of logic, but at least we had fun there. Tideland just makes me seasick -- to the point where my vomit is the liquid our log is floating on. On. And on.


10
Narwhals
creatures

Yes, we're talking about God's very own wacked-out creation. Alright, hear me out on this one... yes... hear me out... I MEAN JUST LOOK AT THEM! They're friggin' unicorns of the sea! Unicorns! But the thing is, we don't actually have unicorns in this world, but for whatever reason, God gave us narwhals. Whales with super long horns attached to their heads. That's like something Dr. Evil would have asked for in the middle ages. Instead of "sharks with friggin' laser beams attached to their heads," he be jabbering on about "whales with friggin' horns attached to their heads." You see? You see the symmetry? You should.


9
The Batman Trilogy
directed by Christopher Nolan
film

This only works if you watch all three flicks in a row. Batman and company may seem to be putting together a series of coherent action sequences, but overtime, there's a certain numbing effect that proceeds from his methodology. After awhile, I start feeling sloshed around. I don't know where I am or how I got here. Look intently, and you'll see that just like Nolan lays out for his dreams in "Inception", every scene in the Batman films starts in the middle and leaves before the end. We never see the entirety of a moment. We enter and leave somewhere in the middle. It takes the foundation out from under you. It make you swim. Down and down.


8
Parting of the Sensory
by Modest Mouse
song

A song that begins with a series of loose angry questions plummets into a whirlpool of cacophonic round of the line,
one day you will die and
somehow something's going to steal your carbon
listen to the song here.

It's the whirlpool at the end of the world. But no one is ever quite too sure what's at the center of one of those monstrosities.

P.S. A few months ago I read an Edgar Allan Poe short story about a terrifyingly intense whirlpool in Norway. Since then, I've thought about them from time to time with a certain timidity had not had before. 



7
Shel Silverstein Poems
poetry

The thing is, so many of them are so darn quaint and small and simple, that you begin to be eaten up by them. For example, from "Every Thing On It"
THE RACE
If you rode a turtle
And I rode a snail
And we raced to the equator,
One of us would come in last
And one of us would come later

It won't happen all at once. But heed my warning, little by little, piece by piece, he'll devour you. You and everyone you love. Over and over.


6
The Scream
by Edvard Munck
painting


The fame of this work minimizes its bravura and stare factor. Nevertheless, I heretofore include this painting because it makes you feel wobbly not while you're looking at it, but some indeterminate time in the future. It's the same feeling one gets after jumping off the log flume, where you realize that during the course of a four minute ride, you've developed sea legs that aren't quite too keen on being reanimated to earthen life. And those people in the back; who are they? They just walk and walk and walk... always nearer, always.



5
The Crying of Lot 49
by Thomas Pynchon
novel


This novel encapsulates the the ever expanding (and breaking) neurosis of the paranoia of conspiracy theorists. The novel follows a woman's exploration of a mysterious mail service that had gone underground somewhere in the course of history. This closet mail service resides as some sort of cultic principle of subversion to the government. But anyway... the novel's effect is found in its bizarre momentary reflections. For instance:

"It comes into your dreams, you know. Filthy machine. Did you ever see the one about Porky Pig and the anarchist?"

...while a headache began to flower behind her eyes...

He was a disk jockey who worked further along the Peninsula and suffered regular crises of conscience about his profession.

"The pin I'm wearing means I'm a member of the IA. That's Inamorati Anonymous. An inamorati is somebody in love. That's the worst addiction of all."

Day by day, Wendell is less himself and more generic.

Each couple on the floor danced whateer was in the fellow's head: tango, two-step, bossa nova, slop. But how long, Oedipa thought, could it go on before collisions became a serious hindrance? There would have to be collisions. The only alternative was some unthinkable order of music, many rhythms, all keys at once, a choreography in which each couple meshed easy, predestined.

If these various subject matters rattled on an wrapped into the core themes of the book, well then fine. But the hell of it is that the theme of the book is wrapped into these passing fancies. They are the absorbing force. More and more.


4
Who Framed Roger Rabbit?
directed by Robert Zemeckis
film

I weep bitterly when insane Doc Brown murders those shoes.


3
Blood Meridian
by Cormac McCarthy
novel


The bloodiest thing I ever trudged through. The book spins and spins on what seems to be an illusory orbit just beyond our grasp. We follow, 'the kid', as he joins a band of marauders in the 1800s through Texas and Mexico (mainly). We are pulverized, page after page, by horrendous fashions of violence. And then we too are taken out. We, the readers exhumed of grace and dignity, are finally (perhaps mercifully) undone and undid. The novel, in my estimation, would be a dud if it did not include its last few breaths. Those are the crystallizing agents of a ride that should continue to haunt us, as evil always tends to do on this earth.
 
2
Eyes Wide Shut
directed by Stanley Kubrick
film

The dreamy red, white, and blue cascade of colors throughout the film alone sets the viewer up for an enterprise in surreality. The events of one faithful (almost unfaithful) night of Dr. William Harford are not so strange that we can't imagine them happening. We can. But it's rather the awful sensation of, 'once this ride starts, we can't get off!' that drives this boat to madness. The film sneaks into the bloodstream the carnal knowledge that sex is transcendent in potency and power -- the point being: none of us have a clue what we're getting ourselves into when we engage in that play. You don't know what's around the bend, but your stomach is already dropping. Dropping and dropping.

1
Apocalypse Now
directed by Francis Ford Coppola
film


Don't watch the Redux. It kills the ride. The film breathlessly tops the list because it would make the most badass Disney ride ever... and it would translate so very well. Actions on the edge of reality, such as war, spin our sense of self, dwarf our approximations of morality, and contort our inner child into something we can't grasp.

Apocalypse Now teaches us through its drift up the river, that we neither know who we are, or what we can become. The slippery slope of this log flume is that we are, as both species and individuals, ever-changing... but we really don't know what it is we're becoming.

“I never want to forget it... I never want to forget. And then I realized... like I was shot... like I was shot with a diamond... a diamond bullet right through my forehead. And I thought, my God... the genius of that! The genius! The will to do that! Perfect, genuine, complete, crystalline, pure. And then I realized they were stronger than we, because they could stand that these were not monsters, these were men... trained cadres. These men who fought with their hearts, who had families, who had children, who were filled with love... but they had the strength... the strength... to do that. If I had ten divisions of those men, our troubles here would be over very quickly. You have to have men who are moral... and at the same time who are able to utilize their primordial instincts to kill without feeling... without passion... without judgment... without judgment! Because it's judgment that defeats us.”

Be careful. It's ever so easy to slide down that ride and end up a monster.
Monster and monster.


Dante has lived in multiple places. In each of those places, he has read to
his dog. She doesn't seem to mind, but Dante is suspicious that she's
not actually very interested in what he has to say. You have to
understand, Dante's dog can't read. So he has to read aloud to her.
He hopes that you can read for yourself, and that maybe you'll read
the things that he's read aloud to his dog. Maybe you'll be more
interested in the things Dante has written and read aloud than the dog is.



Follow the tour HERE for exclusive excerpts, guest posts and a giveaway!


, , , , , , , , , , , ,

You Might Also Like

0 Comments

Please try not to spam posts with the same comments over and over again. Authors like seeing thoughtful comments about their books, not the same old, "I like the cover" or "sounds good" comments. While that is nice, putting some real thought and effort in is appreciated. Thank you.