Category Archives: Speculative

Action, Adventure, Espionage, Military, Non-Fiction/Documentary, SHTF, TEOTWAWKI

The Shelter-in-Place Book Sale

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There’s a lot of stuff going on right now. Some of the “solutions” to COVID-19/the Wuhan Coronavirus are wrong, infuriating, and scary. In the short term, a lot of us are worried about our jobs–will they even exist once this mess blows over?

People around the world are worried about putting food on the table. For those in that position, I urge you to be as wise as you can with what resources you have.

For those who have food and water covered, but are bored and need something to do, Virtual Pulp is cutting the prices on our E-Books. I’ve suddenly got a lot more time to read than normal, and it’s one positive side effect of this crisis. Below are text links and image links (yes–you can just click on the book cover image to buy one from Amazon) for reduced-price E-Books. They’re available in all electronic formats and pretty much every online book store except Google Play.

Stay safe and keep your powder dry.

Buy all three Retreads novels from Amazon.
Buy the whole series from Amazon.

The entire Retreads series is available for a song at Amazon. Well, I don’t think they actually make you sing. But the three E-Books will cost less than a cheeseburger from the drive-through.

And, of course, the books are for sale individually, too. Hell and Gone was the series premier, my first bestseller, and still the most popular of all my books.

Buy Hell and Gone for the Kindle.
Click to buy on Amazon.

Buy it for the Nook on Barnes & Noble.

Buy it at the Kobo store.

Buy it at the Apple store.

Buy it at Smashwords.

The second retreads novel is Tier Zero. Many readers thought it was even better than the first book.

Click to buy Tier Zero for the Kindle.
Click to buy on Amazon.

Buy it for the Nook on Barnes & Noble.

Buy it at the Kobo store.

Buy it at the Apple store.

Buy it at Smashwords.

With the third book, False Flag, the series took a turn into SHTF (I believe the current term in use is “boogaloo”) patriot fiction.

Buy False Flag for the Kindle.
Click to buy on Amazon.

Buy it for the Nook on Barnes & Noble.

Buy it at the Kobo store.

Buy it at the Apple store.

Buy it at Smashwords.

Virtual Pulp contributor Paul Hair also has some work published you should look at.  It is not on sale currently, but still worth a read. You can find his short stories in the Appalling Stories series.

Buy the Appalling Stories bundle.
Click to buy from Amazon.

Or you can buy them individually. First, there’s the original Appalling Stories.

Buy Appalling Stories 1.
Buy it on Amazon.

Then the sequel anthology, Appalling Stories 2.

Buy Appalling Stories 2.
Buy it on Amazon.

Paul came back (and Hank added a story, too) in Appalling Stories 4.

Buy Appalling Stories 4.
Buy it on Amazon.


vv

Reviews, TEOTWAWKI

My Lai by David Dubrow – a Review

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Back in the postwar years, there were several science fiction movies with a theme that involved powerful aliens using mind control on humanity. If you grew up watching reruns of old TV shows (before there were a zillion 24-hour cable channels), then you may have noticed the old “invisible alien entity takes over the ship via mind control of the crew” plot used a few times in the original Star Trek and nearly every episode of Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea.

My Lai has no concrete connection to the atrocity in Vietnam, so far as I can tell. It’s got a similar theme to those old science fiction dramas, but with a twist: the sinister force taking over Planet Earth is neither alien nor invisible. In fact, most of us have probably encountered this villain at least once. I can tell you that a young, bored boy growing up in the backwoods with time on his hands and a rock or other potential projectile within reach is very well acquainted with this particular villain.

(That’s right: bees. Throw something into a beehive and find out how fast you can run…or how many bee stings you can tolerate.)

Bees have decided that it’s time to take the planet back from humanity. Much like a demonic entity, they start by possessing the body of a human, and can then control it from within. The method of possession is rather grotesque, but is similar to how parasites perform mind control in the animal kingdom. Using one human host, the bees can entrap and infiltrate others. The human hosts then become drones, nurses, or queens, just like their tiny insect puppetmasters.

When the story opens, the bees’ plot for world domination has been wildly successful, but there is organized human resistance. One particular guerrilla band uses guns, flamethrowers, and Molotov cocktails to bring smoke on a hybrid colony of bees and their human thralls. Hoowah! The mayhem is quite gratifying. Their destruction of a hive/village would no doubt be considered equivalent to the My Lai massacre by the bees and those controlled by them.

I haven’t asked author David Dubrow anything about this story, but I’d be astounded if he denied that it is a parable–probably on more than one level.

The way the bees spread their control smacks of “the domino theory,” for starters. For regular readers of this blog who have seen me refer to our collective enemy as “the Hive Mind” (when I write about the left wing, the SJWs; or the institutions they dominate like Hollywood, academia, Big Tech, the DNC, etc.), you might see this for the perfect metaphor that it is. Once a person is melded into the Hive Mind, any potential or capability they once might have had for independent thought is subsumed by whatever The Narrative is during the Current Year.

(For instance: the Leftist Hive Mind once vehemently defended the First Amendment, in order to push pornography, junk science, and Marxist propaganda. But now that they’ve transformed the culture, brainwashed the masses, and secured power for themselves, they are trying to eradicate the First Amendment [with “hate speech” legislation, selective application of “separation of Church and State” arguments, etc.] so that no thoughtcriminals can challenge any aspect of their Narrative.)

This is an overtly politically-focused review (shocker, eh?). But My Lai doesn’t sledgehammer the politics at readers the way I often do on this blog. The political message is there if you want to notice it, but it’s not overbearing and there are possibly many readers who would miss it altogether…just like how the last few generations have been unaware of the underlying messages in mainstream entertainment.

My Lai is one thought-provoking story in Appalling Stories 4–an anthology that is well off the beaten path.

Action, Adventure, Espionage, Military, SHTF

False Flag – More and More Relevant As Time Goes On

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False Flag is “an action-packed, enjoyable and terrifying read.” – R.A. Mathis (author of Ghosts of Babylon and the Homeland series).

A terrorist group came into possession of a tactical nuke. Uncle Sam covertly put together a squad of mercs and SpecOps veterans to swipe the WMD before it could be used. The team of military contractors led by former SEAL Rocco Cavarra, who prefixed their radio call signs with the term “has-been,” had to fight their way through war-torn Sudan to reach the terrorist camp where the bomb was stashed. This all happened in Hell and Gone, the first book in the Retreads series.

Ten years later, the survivors of the Sudan mission helped their SF buddy Tommy Scarred Wolf execute a hostage rescue in South Asia. The Retreads shot it out with human traffickers, pirates, and  a secret team of black ops assassins. This took place in the pages of Tier Zero–the second and most action-packed Retreads novel so far.

While the Retreads were fighting overseas over the years (officially and unofficially), bad stuff has been happening on the home front in their own country. Now the USA is speeding over a cliff into economic collapse, nuclear terrorism, and civil war, and the Retreads are caught up in the middle of it in False Flag: the third novel.

Amazon reviewers have called False Flag “a runaway action thriller,” “a thinkers book,” and “an awe-inspiring ride.”  More than a few have used the phrase: “ripped from the headlines,” but there are trace amounts of what would never make the headlines. Certain subplots would be dismissed as “conspiracy theory” in some circles, but in the wake of Jeffrey Epstein’s death, those circles are shrinking.

Both Hell and Gone and Tier Zero are available in audio book format as well as paperback and e-book. There are plans for a False Flag audio book as well. Now is a great time to pick up  one of these great reads. They’re unlike anything else being published today; and they’re distinct from the action-adventure of yesteryear, too.

Military, Reviews, TEOTWAWKI

The End by G. Michael Hopf – a Review

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The subtitle says “A Post-Apocalyptic Novel,” and this book is the first in “The New World Series.”

The story is told in flashback via a surviving character in 2066 “Cascadia.” That character is in bookend chapters that frame the narrative. The main story opens in the suburbs of San Diego right before an EMP turns out the lights, permanently. A little bit of time is spent establishing that the protagonist, Gordon Van Zandt, is a dedicated family man with just enough soy in his diet to make him palatable to female readers. He’s an Iraq veteran whose little brother is currently in the USMC, hoping to become a scout-sniper.

In the author bio section of the Amazon product page, the author claims to be a USMC veteran. That may be true–there is at least some rudimentary military knowledge evident. Maybe he had a rear-echelon clerk/jerk MOS. There were a few details here and there that didn’t sit right, but not enough to make you toss the book aside, by any stretch.

The EMP strikes the USA, and Gordon goes into Scramble, Forage, and Protect Mode. (While doing so, he explains what an EMP is far too many times for a reader with reasonable memory retention.) His family-first instincts kick into high gear right away, which cause him to make some tough decisions that others are not yet ready to make.

The plot toggles between Gordon’s ordeal, little brother Sebastian’s story, and federal-level politicians. For the most part, the character interactions are believable, although there is a high Character Stupidity Quotient in effect–especially when it comes to Sebastian. Sebastian is such an idiot that, were he the star of the show, I probably would have quit reading. (Ironic, because toward the end, I found his story the most interesting.) I lost patience and began to skim through the sub-plots with the Speaker of the House-turned-President, his wife, Vice President, assistants and generals. Those segments resembled a literary soap opera that aren’t really even necessary for the plot.

Speaking of plot, this one does not suffer from predictability. I wonder how much of that was by design and how much was because the author was just making it up as he went along. I strongly suspected the latter when it came to Jimmy, Gordon’s neighbor. When first introduced, the reader gets the impression Gordon barely knew Jimmy; but as the chapters plod forward, a transformation takes place and the two neighbors have been great friends for years.

One of the most annoying personality traits of Gordon Van Zandt is his tendency to make promises he can’t keep. A lot of the dialog is amateurish as well, but then I guess this is the author’s first novel.

I made the decision to buy this book after reading some of the complaints by the one-star reviewers that there wasn’t enough GRRRL POWER on display. Sure enough: there was a lot less feminist garbage than you get in the average novel–whatever side of the aisle the authors fall on. I was thankful for that, but I was hoping (if there was any evidence of author worldview at all) that the author would turn out to be a patriot or full-bore, unapologetic, firebreathing right-winger. The overall flavor, however, is Log Cabin NeoCuck. By the second novel it becomes blatantly obvious, but I’ll say more if/when I review the sequel.

I guess the only full-bore, unapologetic, firebreathing right-wing authors on the cultural landscape these days are under Virtual Pulp’s umbrella.

Reviews, TEOTWAWKI

War For the Planet of the Apes – a Review

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First of all, the title is a bit deceptive. There is a war brewing between apes and men–like it was in the last movie or two, but this one doesn’t depict a war.

There is a cheesy firefight scene at the end, and an ambush of sorts at the very beginning, and that’s about the extent of the combat. The bulk of the film is a psychological profile of Caesar. Woody Harrelson (doing his best Colonel Kurtz) murder’s his wife and son, so Caesar is tempted to adopt tactics and methods that are just as ee-veel as those used by the bad guys (humans).

In this ongoing reboot of the franchise, the film makers evidently intend to erase generations of history. The apes haven’t even taken over the planet yet, and they’ve already introduced both Cornelius and Nova.

The cinematography was the best aspect of the  film. Otherwise, meh.

Adventure, Reviews, SHTF, TEOTWAWKI

“Another Excellent Novel”

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There are downsides to having a bestseller. It gives your book more exposure, which is certainly a net gain; but it also draws plenty of wild cards.

As in all businesses, customers are probably about 75% more determined to make their opinions known when they have a complaint than when they find a product satisfactory. In the book biz, you also have some jealous, petty and vindictive authors prowling Amazon to size up the competition who, I guess, assume they can elevate their own work by trying to make other author’s work look bad. And then there’s controversial books like False Flag, which are gonna trigger sheeple and SJWs, even when they are warned up front that a particular book will not be their cup of tea.

Case in point: shortly after the post about Roy Moore went live on this blog, somebody posted the first-ever one-star review for Hell and Gone, admitting within the “review” that they hadn’t read the book. Up until then, my debut novel had never drawn less than four stars from any Amazon reviewer. I smell a motive for this drive-by, but who knows.

So the vigilant haters have managed to drag False Flag‘s cumulative review score down to 4.2 stars, but comments like the following tend to improve morale:

Another excellent novel by Henry Brown

First of all let me state that this is the third novel by Henry Brown I have read featuring “Rocco’s Retreads” a group of different special warfare operators who are mostly retired from different branches of the active duty military.


It’s a direct follow up to Tier Zero– the novel where Native American lawman and ex spec ops warrior Tommy Scarred Wolf and some of his friends and family set out to rescue a group of females from the nearby Rez who had been kidnapped in a foreign country.

This time around, Tommy and some of the Retreads have been targeted by a sleazebag Statist DHS spook and his underhanded operators- including several who are basically Manchurian Candidate Brainwashees.
Tommy is now the Sheriff in the town where the nearby Rez is located and his friends are scattered to the Southwest. Rocco, Leon and Carlos are now operating a shooting range and firearms sales and supply shop; Mac has gotten involved with a sleazy race-card baiter in Federal Law Enforcement and Josh has retired to the life of a modern Mountain Man.


Essentially Josh and some of the others find out that Rocco’s Retreads have been flagged as Domestic Terrorists by the dirtbags from DHS and worse- the same scumbags are planning on a False Flag attack on a peace rally in Amarillo Texas following the senseless beating of an African American motorist.


Talk about being ripped from the headlines.


As the NeoFascists in Federal Government see it, by attacking the rally and pinning the rap on “Right Wing Militia extremists” it will give them the justification among the McSheeple to go after the Internet and gun owners.


Tommy, Josh and the majority of their friends and family decide to try and stop the False Flag attack.
When they call in a phony bomb threat and the “proper authorities” refuse to evacuate the facility…well, it’s time for Tommy’s pals in the Native American Militia to step forward and stop the slaughter of innocent people and try and save the country from the insidious forces within the corridors of power who see Freedom as a threat to their own lustful power grabs.


The book is sobering at times and downright funny at others. The descriptions of some of the peripheral characters (looters and so forth) reminded me of some of the more razor-sharp satirical Destroyer Novels written by the late great Richard Sapir and Warren Murphy as both rednecks and looters get scalded by Brown’s pen.


I would love to see these books made into movies someday. However they are so politically incorrect that its’ mostly a pipe dream at this point.
If you enjoyed the Destroyer novels or the old Phoenix Force and Able Team books the Retreads series is right up your alley.

If you’re willing to take just a few minutes to make a small-but-significant impact in the culture war, and you’ve read one or more of my books, why not drop a couple lines into a review and counter some of this sabotage? Amazon isn’t yet as bad as Twitter, Facebook, or Wikipedia, but they’ve proven to me they are sympathetic to these SJW trolls. They took down a review I posted (it’s long-winded; sorry) even though it was obvious I read the book, and I hadn’t violated any of their published guidelines; but they won’t take leftist hit pieces down, even when it’s obvious the troll hasn’t read the book. There’s not much I can do about that. By posting an honest review, however, you could dilute this well-poisoning.

Adventure, Military, SHTF

False Flag: #1 Bestseller

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About this time last year, Hell and Gone climbed into Amazon’s Top 100 in the overall Kindle bestseller rankings.

That’s no easy task in the present-day book biz. This year the third novel in the series has followed suit. False Flag  reached #1 Bestseller in three categories as of Saturday afternoon, and threatened to take the top spot in a couple more–coming as close as #2 in post-apocalyptic fiction. (It’s actually more “apocalyptic” than “post-apocalyptic” anyway, but I’ll try to resist sperging about that.)

This dystopian thriller (ahem) is currently still on sale for 99 cents at the major E-Book vendors…

…And pretty much everywhere else that sells E-Books.

Hell and Gone was originally written as a one-off military thriller, with an old-school adventure flavor. Fans, however, suggested a sequel. I wrote one, shooting intentionally for more of a throwback men’s adventure/paramilitary fiction vibe, as the cover suggests. Tier Zero was what resulted. Fans thought the sequel was even better than Hell and Gone, and this time I intentionally built some springboards for yet another book.

FF#1bestsellermensadventure

With False Flag, I took the same characters and thrust them into a SHTF/apocalyptic scenario.

Unfortunately, politics are interwoven with every part of life these days. This book reflects that. As readers of my blog posts are no-doubt aware of, I don’t pull my punches that often anymore when sharing my observations. So even people who identify as “conservative” (whatever that means) find my outlook to be a little…raw.

Since I hate being sucker-punched with the obligatory left-wing political message in ostensibly apolitical books, I carefully worded everything from the title, “False Flag,” to its product description, so that nobody would be blind-sided when I call it like I see it. In fact, most drones from the SJW Hive Mind run squealing from my portfolio after little more than a couple seconds. Often, just a glimpse at my cover art is sufficient to reveal that I am alien to their echo chamber. For this book I heaped on overkill in the form of a Samuel Adams quote on the product page.

This was my way of ensuring that soy-consuming, rainbow tattoo-sporting, public transportation-advocating manginas and nancy-boys would not read my books…and therefore not be triggered.

But, just like Wikepedia, Goodreads, and…well…every platform on the Web, goose-stepping Commie Thought Police are patrolling 24/7, seeking to quarantine any heretical idea before it can bring The Narrative into question.  They don’t avoid material that “triggers” them–they purposefully seek it out, as part of their holy mission to protect others from exposure to unauthorized wrongthink. Such trolls, however, take my honest warnings as a weakness to exploit; and individuals of this moral caliber have no qualms about “reviewing” a book they haven’t read.

Here’s the one-star “review” one such hero left for False Flag, and my response to it:

Midwit Sage (AKA “Amazon Customer”): If you took out the extended political and poorly disguised racial ranting you would barely have a short story. Good enough for the preachers choir but hardly good story telling. It’s no wonder the author couldn’t get a real publisher to touch his work…Tom Clancy has nothing to fear!

Yours Truly: If you took out the vague, politically-butthurt insults of this “review” by a drive-by Thought Cop who probably didn’t even read the book, you would barely  have enough left over to classify it as a cyber-knee-jerk. But thanks for demonstrating how someone of your integrity and sophistication reacts to this not-really-published work.

Now why, I wonder, would they use the term “poorly disguised racial ranting?” Obviously they’re trying to scare potential readers off by implying  sinister racism. But why not just come out and accuse me of full-blown racism, then? SJWs are certainly not shy about crying “racist” for any and every (or no) reason. It might have something to do with the difference between slander and libel.

More Retreads novels are germinating in my mind, but there’s a couple other books I want to work on before I get back to this series.

Meanwhile, if you haven’t jumped into the series already, now’s a great time to start.

Of course there are paperback versions of all the Retreads novels, and the first two are also available in Audible Books (links below) for those who are on the go. I do want to put together an audiobook for that title, if I can find the time. Same deal with revamping our book section here on the site–it’s on the to-do list; just need to catch a break from Real Life Stuff to get ‘er done.

FF#1bestsellerpolitical

 

Adventure, Military, Reviews, SHTF

Every Blade of Grass by R.A. Mathis – A Review

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In this third novel in the Homeland series, there’s a turning point in Civil War II. Some Americans saw the writing on the wall, and bugged out just before “The Second Founding.” They organized while in hiding, and are now coming out to tangle with the forces of the new regime.

The state governments have been dissolved, and what was once the continental USA  has been divided into 10 regions under the totalitarian government of President Tophet. But in Tennessee, there are enough surviving patriots (even in the legislature) that resistance to the takeover is made official. Tennessee will not lay down without a fight.

Sergeant Cole has found the organized resistance–in this instance led by LTC Lee, his old battalion C.O. But concern over his family leads him to undertake his own mission to find them even as the flames of civil war spark to life across the country.

There is significant character development in this book–not just of Cole, either. Eduardo Garcia has quite the interesting character arc, which culminates here.

Author Mathis has masterfully woven a tale of one possible future history of the USA in the Homeland trilogy, which doesn’t bog down in technical details at all, or read like an advertisement for gold, survival supplies, or anything else. What this third novel does deliver is hope. The collapse of the USA as we know it may be inevitable, but it’s comforting to imagine there will be enough people with the wisdom, courage, and competence to mount an effective resistance.

I recommend you read the entire series. And speaking of that: the three novels have been combined into one omnibus edition now.

Action, Crime, Reviews, TEOTWAWKI

Speed Week Plus: Mad Max – a Review

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Motorized Mayhem Down Under! Time to take Speed Week Plus south of the Equator, to a continent comprised entirely of one country–and into the future, where civilization is on the verge of complete breakdown.

Imagine an Australia populated with butch, entitled women; supplicating nancy-boy males considered “men;” oppressed by a draconian police state hell-bent on gobbling up more power until farting in the privacy of your own toilet is a crime punishable by death…

Oh, wait. No need to imagine–Australia is just about there already. Imagine instead an Australia saved from that dystopian present by a nuclear holocaust and utter economic devastation. Whew!

That merciful cataclysm seems to be underway at the beginning of the original, unfeminized Mad Max.

I should clarify something up front: I won’t be including Beyond Thunderdome for Speed Week Plus, and probably never will review it or the more recent Mad Maxine.

So the “thin blue line” Down Under has become razor thin, fighting a losing battle to keep civilization from toppling. Amoral, perverse gangs rule the roads, stealing whatever they want, raping whoever they want (which is pretty much anyone), and more than willing to murder and destroy in order to do it.

On the side of good is the MFP: Main Force Patrol. Just as our police have come to be known as “cops,” originally “coppers” because of the badges worn by New York policemen, these Aussie lawmen’s badges were made from a different metal, hence they are slurred as “the bronze” by the villains in this film (as well as the hero in Fast Cars and Rock & Roll, which pays homage to many films, including this one).

A very young Mel Gibson plays Max, the MFP’s star patrolman, who’s considering quitting the force and taking his family away from the madness. To bribe him into staying, the MFP makes an unofficial gift to him of “the last of the V8 Interceptors.” It’s a black-on-black Australian Ford Falcon, supercharged, with “Phase IV heads” and “Nitro.” By the end of the movie Max deputizes the Falcon Interceptor to run down the gang that murdered his family and made a vegetable of his friend Goose.

Mad Max Poster

By the way, the clutched supercharger on the Falcon was a pure fabrication sold via the magic of film editing. But Hollywood has plagiarized it with their own clutch-driven blowers in movies like My Science Project.

Director George Miller was fascinated with medical apperattus and you’ll see some on display in Mad Max and its sequel. He must have been equally obsessed with Catholic symbolism.

But the appeal of this movie is the high-octane action, and it’s got a lot. The speed scenes were undercranked to exaggerate the velocity of moving vehicles, yet it was accomplished with a subtle touch so that it doesn’t make everything comical.

That’s not to say there aren’t some laughable moments (dig that Roman Candle in the exhaust pipe)–if you watch the version with overdubbed American voices, it’s downright groan-worthy. So I recommend getting the version with the original soundtrack.

“We remember the Night Rider! And we know who you are.”