ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Weston Ochse is a former intelligence officer and special operations soldier who has engaged enemy combatants, terrorists, narco smugglers, and human traffickers. His personal war stories include performing humanitarian operations over Bangladesh, being deployed to Afghanistan, and a near miss being cannibalized in Papua New Guinea. His fiction and non-fiction has been praised by USA Today, The Atlantic, The New York Post, The Financial Times of London, and Publishers Weekly. The American Library Association labeled him one of the Major Horror Authors of the 21st Century. His work has also won the Bram Stoker Award, been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, and won multiple New Mexico-Arizona Book Awards. A writer of more than 26 books in multiple genres, his military supernatural series SEAL Team 666 has been optioned to be a movie starring Dwayne Johnson. His military sci fi series, which starts with Grunt Life, has been praised for its PTSD-positive depiction of soldiers at peace and at war. Weston likes to be called a chaotic good paladin and challenges anyone to disagree. After all, no one can really stand a goody two-shoes lawful good character. They can be so annoying. It's so much more fun to be chaotic, even when you're striving to save the world. You can argue with him about this and other things online at Living Dangerously or on Facebook at Badasswriter. All content of this blog is copywrited by Weston Ochse.

Saturday, March 3, 2012

BLOOD OCEAN Review Roundup: Or where I reinvent reading with my merciless skill

Reviews have been pouring in from sources such as the Financial Times of London to a young man who started reading again because of Blood Ocean (I'm not kidding).  Here's a short rundown--


1. Financial Times of London: I have 'Merciless Skill' says the Financial Times of London re BLOOD OCEAN:

"The plot, in which a young Hawaiian, Kavika, seeks revenge for the murder of a friend, almost takes a back seat to the multilayered, often ironic and sometimes sickeningly degenerate seaborne society depicted here with such vivid, merciless skill."

I like it that I have merciless skill! There's more at this link.


2. Abaddon Books: This is the publisher, so it's not really a review, but they did ask me a whole bunch of questions about the process of writing the book. Questions like:



Abbadon: Tell us a bit about Blood Ocean and why people should buy it. 
Weston: If it was a movie, I’d call it Road Warrior meets Battle Royale. To compare books its like if The Horseclans Books and Lord of the Flies had a Hawaiian baby and this was the result. Honestly, this is as original as they come.
The rest of the Q & A can be found here.


3.  Fantasy Nibbles: The folks over at Fantasy Nibbles gave Blood Ocean a great review. They also have a scoring system, which I'm not familiar with. Looks like algebra to me. All I know is I scored higher tha Paolini's Eldest, and equaled his first novel Eragon and it thrills me to no end that I can write better than a sixteen year old. 


This was a brilliant read, fast paced & exciting with undertones of sheer terror. Really well written. I enjoyed it immensely. I’ve not read any of the other books in The Afterblight Chronicles, but they’re now being added to my list. This works wonderfully as a standalone though.
The rest of the terrific review can be found here.  


4. Falcata Times: Another solid review. The folks over at Falcata Times are good people.


One of the things about the wonderfully inventive Afterblight series is that you can never be sure of what you’re going to get, this release being a prime example of that. Here, within this title by Weston Ochse is a story of betrayal, a tale of redemption all blended with a coming of age element set in an apocalyptic future.


The best part of the review (which can be found in its entirety here) is that the reviewer said that he/she was glad they read it. I figure with the job of reviewing books, reading can become onerous sometimes. Glad to not be that book that they HAVE to read. 


5. The Big Thrill. This is the monthly online magazine of the International Thriller Writers. They did a little piece on Blood Ocean too. It can be found here


6. And finally, there's Kevin Stewart: Here's the story. There's a new local restaurant that Yvonne and I adore called Pizzeria Mimosa. The owner had previously reached out to us because she's a horror fan. So on one occasion Yvonne brought her a copy of her first novel AfterAge and more recently I brought a copy of Empire of Salt. The owner thanked me publicly on Facebook, which was read by Kevin, who then went to Amazon, where he read the first chapter for free, then he was hooked.  Well, as it turns out, Kevin is a hard-working mechanic and doesn't have a lot of time to read fiction. In fact, he hasn't ready any fiction since 2001 - Battlefield Earth (that book is SOOO much better than the movie). But he read Blood Ocean. And now he's back in the world of reading fiction.


Blood Ocean is an incredible, and fast paced imaginative story, that will keep you reading long past your bedtime.

Kevin blogged about it and posted a review on his site and at amazon. It's a lovely story.

No comments :

Post a Comment