About the book, Dangerous Blues: Kind of a Ghost Story 
• Publisher: Flexible Press (October 3, 2022)
• Paperback: 257 pages
Dangerous Blues explores a dark yet comic storm of family relationships laced with a buzz of the supernatural, where the fleeting light of the present must constantly contend with the shadows of the past.
Paul Brickner and his 12-year-old daughter Spring are subletting an apartment in New York City. They came to escape the sorrow of their empty house in upstate New York after Nadia, Paul’s wife and Spring’s mother, dies.
Spring quickly takes to her new Manhattan middle school life, including making a new friend, Irina. Through that connection, Paul meets Irina’s mother, Tara White, a blues singer, and perhaps just the spark Paul has been missing.
But Paul begins to fear that he is being haunted by Nadia, who appears to him in fleeting images. Is he imagining it, or is she real? Tara, who grew up in the inscrutable New England cult known as the Dream People, is haunted, too, hounded by her very real brothers to return to the family, and to give back the magical object—a shamanic Tibetan vessel—which they claim she stole from them.
Paul’s cousin Hank, a disreputable art dealer, becomes obsessed with this object. Meanwhile, Paul’s father-in-law, an expert on occult lore, tries to steer Paul toward resolution with Nadia’s ghost.
Driven by Paul’s new circle of odd and free spirited iconoclasts, Dangerous Blues asks the question: when do you let go, and what are you willing to let go of?
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About the author, Stephen Policoff 
Stephen Policoff’s 1st novel, BEAUTIFUL SOMEWHERE ELSE, won the James Jones Award, and was published by Carroll & Graf in 2004. His essay about his disabled daughter’s experience in music therapy, “Music Today?” won the Fish Short Memoir Award and was published in FISH ANTHOLOGY 2012 (West Cork University Press, Ireland). It subsequently appeared in KINDLING QUARTERLY and has been widely republished on music therapy sites all over the world. His memoir, SIXTEEN SCENES FROM A FILM I NEVER WANTED TO SEE, was published by Monkey Puzzle Press in January 2014. His 2nd novel, COME AWAY, won the Mid-Career Author Award, and was published by Dzanc Books in November 2014. He teaches writing in Global Liberal Studies at NYU.
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My Thoughts
I love a good ghost story, and I love music, so Dangerous Blues was a great match for me. Going in, I didn’t realize this was a sequel to author Stephen Policoff’s earlier works, but it reads very well as a stand-alone novel. I didn’t feel like I had to play catch-up to understand what was going on because it was quite simple: Paul and his daughter Spring need to get away from the house where Nadia (his wife, her mother) died, so they sublet an apartment in New York. I loved the opening scenes showing their arrival in the apartment, and the mix of the owner’s be;longings and the emptiness, as well as the fact that said owner (Rose, Spring’s aunt) left them plates of food for their first night.
What really hooked me on this novel, though, were the details. Paul walks into Spring’s room to find that instead of choosing between two not-very-appealing bunks, she’s bundled up on the floor, early in the novel, and its the sort of scene only a parent would think to write. I also liked that Nadia’s ghost may or may not merely be a dream, a manifestation of Paul’s sadness, though her reality does not change the fact that both father and daughter must grieve and move on.
The entire novel had a very bluesy feeling to it, which tied nicely to the presence of Tara, blues singer, and mother to Spring’s best friend in New York. I felt like each character had a motif – Spring’s was bright and somewhat staccato, Paul’s was slow, told in long saxophone riffs, Irina was almost bop, Tara was the bass line, tying it all together. All four themes were distinct, but blended into something harmonious both with and without Nadia’s quiet melody weaving through it all, and eventually fading. It was this musicality that made me enjoy the book so much – the language, too, was very specific and evocative.
I was expecting a novel about grief to be relentlessly dark, but Policoff is more nuanced that that, and while there is sadness, there are also moments of joy and hope.
Overall, I felt the author’s storytelling was very organic and his characters were interesting and dimensional. I liked this book enough that I want to read the stories that came before it.
Goes well with a proper New York style hotdog, purchased from a sidewalk cart.
Visit the Other Participants on this Tour
Tuesday, November 1st: 100 Pages a Day…Stephanie’s Book Reviews
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Wednesday, November 16th: Bibliotica
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TBD: Monday, November 7th: Instagram: @books_and_biewers
About the book, An Open Door
About the author, Anne Leigh Parrish 
Visit the Other Great Stops on This Tour:
About the book, The Deep Translucent Pond
About the author, James Shelley
At Roanne’s funeral reception, the eagerness for answers was thicker than the abundant short ribs set out next to the potato salad and baked beans. The guests had no appetite. They wanted to sink their teeth into why Roanne chose to die the way she did. And they were all looking to me, her closest friend for fifty years.
A sudden snowfall in Houston reveals family secrets. A trip to Universal Studios to snap a picture of the shark from Jaws becomes a battle of wills between father and son. A midnight séance and the ghost of Janis Joplin conjure the mysteries of sex. A young boy’s pilgrimage to see Elvis Presley becomes a moment of transformation. A young woman discovers the responsibilities of talent and freedom.
Thomas H. McNeely is an Eastside Houston native. He has published short stories and nonfiction in The Atlantic, Texas Monthly, Ploughshares, and many other magazines and anthologies, including Best American Mystery Stories and Algonquin Books’ Best of the South. His stories have been shortlisted for the Pushcart Prize, Best American Short Stories, and O. Henry Award anthologies. He has received National Endowment for the Arts, Wallace Stegner, and MacDowell Colony fellowships for his fiction. His first book, Ghost Horse, won the Gival Press Novel Award and was shortlisted for the William Saroyan International Prize in Writing. He currently teaches in the Stanford Online Writing Studio and at Emerson College, Boston.
In 1917, during the construction of a large reservoir in the Catskill hamlet of Gilboa, New York, a young paleontologist named Winifred Goldring identified fossils from an ancient forest flooded millions of years ago when the earth’s botanical explosion of oxygen opened a path for the evolution of humankind. However, the reservoir water was needed for NYC, and the fossils were buried once again during the flooding of the doomed town.
Peter is a writer, architect, and educator. He is Emeritus Professor at The New School, Parsons School of Design in New York City, where he taught design and wrote on matters of environmental philosophy, design theory, and social practices in the built and natural worlds. Peter comes from a family of writers with an abiding affection for the natural world. His uncle Peter Matthiessen was a three time National Book Award winner, and his brother Jeff Wheelwright is a writer of environmental non-fiction. Educated at Trinity College where he studied painting and sculpture, he went on to receive his Master in Architecture from Princeton University. As an architect, his design work has been widely published in both the national and international press. The Kaleidoscope House, a modernist dollhouse designed in collaboration with artist Laurie Simmons is in the Collection of Architecture and Design at the Museum of Modern Art.
About the book: Shapeshifting: Stories
Michelle Ross’s collection of short stories, Shapeshifting, is a haunting, provocative anthology focusing on motherhood and womanhood, and how the two are intertwined.
Tour Stops
I am a 63 year old Accountant who semi-retired to explore my love of creative writing. In my career I held Board level jobs for over twenty five years, in private, public and third sector organisations. I was born in Coventry, a city then dominated by the car industry and high volume manufacturing. Jaguar, Triumph, Talbot, Rolls Royce, Courtaulds, Massey Ferguson were the major employers, to name but a few.
AMES SHELDON: was born in Minneapolis, Minnesota, and grew up in Wayzata, Minnesota. After graduating from Northrop Collegiate School, she attended Bryn Mawr College, where she majored in English. After graduating, she worked in the legal department of a chemical company, as a reporter at two newspapers, as office manager of a start-up auto salvage business, and eventually as a grant writer and development officer for a variety of nonprofit organizations, ranging from the Sierra Club in San Francisco to the Minnesota Historical Society and the Minneapolis Public Library. She has an M.A. in American Studies and was lead author and associate editor of the groundbreaking Women’s History Sources: A Guide to Archives and Manuscript Collections in the United States (R.R. Bowker, 1979). In the process of working on this monumental reference book, Ames discovered her love of women’s history and of using primary sources for research. Her debut novel, Eleanor’s Wars, won the 2016 Benjamin Franklin Gold Award for Best New Voice: Fiction. Her second novel, Don’t Put the Boats Away, was published on August 27, 2019, by She Writes Press. Her third novel, Lemons in the Garden of Love, will be published in 2021.
With the cloud of the Holocaust still looming over them, twin sisters Bronka and Johanna Lubinski and their parents arrive in the US from a Displaced Persons Camp. In the years after World War II, they experience the difficulties of adjusting to American culture as well as the burgeoning fear of the Cold War.
Meryl Ain’s articles and essays have appeared in Huffington Post, The New York Jewish Week, The New York Times, Newsday and other publications. In 2014, she co-authored the award-winning book, The Living Memories Project: Legacies That Last, and in 2016, wrote a companion workbook, My Living Memories Project Journal. She is a sought-after speaker and has been interviewed on television, radio, and podcasts. She is a career educator and is proud to be both a teacher and student of history. She has also worked as a school administrator.
