Review: The Calendar, by WM Gunn – with Giveaway

The Calendar Blog Tour

 

About the Book, The Calendar 04 Cover, The Calendar

  • Genre: Science Fiction
  • Pages: 302
  • Publication Date: April 3, 2025
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Long-range monitors detect a massive rock plunging through space on a path toward Earth. Will it miss our planet, deliver a glancing blow, or destroy Mankind? And how will people react to an uncertain future? Or will they be told?

What if everything and everyone you cherish vanished in a heartbeat? What if you knew the very day your world would cease to exist? What if you could not save those you love? What if all your dreams and hopes of a brighter tomorrow would never be realized? How would you react if there was nothing you could do to delay it or prevent it? What would you do?

Prepare yourself for the upcoming end of all that is right and wrong. Prepare yourself for the fear and uncertainty of the unknown. Prepare to feel the tension grow and grow.

Prepare to read The Calendar.

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About the author, WM Gunn Author WM Gunn

WM Gunn is a native Texan who spent many years in the pharmaceutical industry in sales, sales management, and training and development. He is active in writing groups and volunteering with non-profit groups. He lives in his hometown in Texas with his high school sweetheart bride of many years. To date, he has written hundreds of short stories, three novellas, and two novels. Holmes, Moriarty, and the Monkeys and Chasing the Sun are two novellas released earlier in 2024. His debut full-length novel The Two Terrors of Tulelake was released in October 2024, as an e-book and as a paperback. The Calendar is his newest novel available in April 2025 as an e-book and in paperback

Connect with WM

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My Thoughts Melissa A. Bartell

Part thriller, part human drama, The Calendar is a truly original novel about a classic science fiction trope: what would you do if you knew a giant meteor was about to slam into the Earth. 05 Social Media 3

But in WM Gunn’s deft hands, this book defies the tropes, forgoing (mostly) the expected flash and bang for quieter moments. The plot progresses not with one protagonist, but in a series of vignettes told over the course of a calendar year, showing us not only who changes when faced with impending doom, and who stays the same.

The early chapters introduce us to the characters – lawyers with marital issues, doctors with challenging patients, criminals, do-gooders, and world leaders faced with what to tell their various constituents. As the novel progresses, details are filled in both with the external crises of the traveling asteroid, nicknamed Goliath, and the more immediate goings-on at home. Each flip of the calendar page (or new chapter) heightens the tension and makes the characters increasingly more dimensional, until they are as real as anyone we readers might know.

The story of the pizzeria owner, Max, who offers free pies to his city’s unhoused population, really struck a chord with me, reminding me of my own local pizza maker who fired up her oven in a shop without electricity to feed first-responders and those who’d lost their homes after last year’s back-to-back hurricanes on Florida’s Gulf Coast. It’s that kind of resonance that makes this novel so compelling.

One detail that makes it even more relatable is the addition of a song that goes with each month, with lyrics quoted in the text and a playlist provided at the end. It’s a nice touch and really added to my appreciation of the author’s work.

It’s not a spoiler to say that this book doesn’t have a happy ending. We’re told in the blurb that Earth won’t survive. But despite the fact that there’s no neat sci-fi solution, this book isn’t sad. It’s uplifting. It’s hopeful. In a world that seems increasingly dark, it reminds us that there are good people all around us. The Calendar should be on every discerning reader’s summer TBR list.

Goes well with: pizza, obviously, the Neapolitan kind with a crispy crust and blistered cheese, and beer or sweet tea, your choice. 

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Book Review: Rip the Sky, by Mark Packard – with Giveaway

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About the book, Rip the Sky Cover Med Res Rip the Sky

  • Genre: Speculative Fiction / Fantasy / Science Fiction
  • Publisher: Bluestreak Publishing
  • Page Count: 317 pages
  • Publication Date: August 21, 2023
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After a shocking courtroom tragedy, a disturbed Vietnam veteran and the vindictive judge who sent him to prison become an unlikely pair of time travelers in a chaotic multiverse. The fallen angel who rescues them wants to guide them to a radiant new life. But first they must return to the scene of a ghastly crime.

Billy Worster was a naïve teenager ill-prepared for the gruesome realities of war. The sole survivor of a deadly massacre in a Vietnamese jungle, he avoided certain death only because he ran away when the shooting started. Riddled with guilt, he comes home to a dusty Texas farm with post-traumatic stress disorder and the crazy notion that he can fly in and out of parallel worlds.

As Billy struggles with addiction and questions his sanity, he is arrested on a drug charge and ends up in the courtroom of Judge Madeline Johnston, a bitter old judge tormented by a dark secret surrounding her father’s death. She callously tosses Billy into prison, but when a greedy executor files a lawsuit to steal his inherited land, Billy is hauled back to her courtroom in chains, where a stunning twist of fate launches them into the sky on an odyssey of discovery and healing.

Spanning forty years from the jungles of Vietnam through infinite, parallel worlds, Rip the Sky examines how the power of forgiveness can lead us toward a better life, no matter how many worlds we may live in.

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About the author, Mark Packard Author Photo cred Adair

Mark Packard spent the last 38 years as a trial attorney and is now retired from the courtroom and working as a mediator. In a life before lawyering he was a journalist and regrets waiting far too long before returning to his roots to write his first novel, Rip the Sky. Though he knows he should have jumped off the merry-go-round years ago, he hopes to hang around long enough to craft a few more tales.

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My Thoughts MissMeliss - 2023

In many ways, Mark Packard’s debut novel Rip the Sky is a war story. Actually, it’s a war story on many levels. There’s the literal war that the main character, Billy Worster, fights in Viet Nam. There’s the mental war between the PTSD he suffers as a result of his experiences in the jungle. There’s the chemical war Billy fights against the drugs and alcohol that make his pain recede. And there’s the metaphysical one, fought not just by Billy, but also by the Judge whose fate is tied to his: Madeline Johnston, the battle for forgiveness of self and others, the fight for a clear conscious and an easy mind.

Author Mark Packard tells all of these war stories elegantly. His descriptions of both the physical – the jungle, the farm where a woman named Rachel gives Billy a literal lifeline, the unforgiving courtroom where Madeline presides – and the metaphysical – the “patch of Eden” that both characters long for – are visceral, cinematic and incredibly specific. His use of language – Billy is not a particularly bright person on the surface – or at least, not academically – while Madeleine is analytical, hiding behind the law as much as interpreting it- is deft. Each word feels carefully crafted, but the overall story never seems contrived. The events that are depicted are often grim, but everything is grounded so well in emotional truth that the story is compelling. I read this book straight through in one evening (then skimmed it a bit later so it would be fresh for this review.  I was rooting for Billy all the way through, even when he made poor choices. By the end, I was willing Madeleine to make the right choices, too.

While this novel isn’t obvious science fiction, there are elements of fantasy flowing through it, and those elements are organic, coming mainly from the capacity of the human mind to give us sanctuary from our own realities when we are at our lowest points. Of course, there’s also a fallen angel, so not all the fantasy is imagined. (Or is it? Aren’t the places we create in our minds as real as the spaces we inhabit?)  The term “speculative fiction” fades in and out of common use, but it’s the most applicable one for this unique novel.

Coming in at a meaty 317 pages, Rip the Sky immerses the reader in Packard’s prose and his gripping, well-paced storytelling. This novel is gritty in places. There is drug use, alcohol abuse, and violence in these pages. But the story is brilliant both as a piece of literature, and as an object lesson in two things: the resilience of the human spirit, and the need to better care for our military veterans.

Goes well with: Prime rib and pinot noir.


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