Living Dangerously: Burning Sky Represents the Pinnacle of the Military Horror Genre

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, August 11, 2018

Burning Sky Represents the Pinnacle of the Military Horror Genre

...so says Sci-Fi and Fantasy Reviewer in the first review of Burning Sky, my 30th published book and the start of a new military horror trilogy.

Wow. What a humbling and inspiring review. The reviewer went into incredible detail, laying the foundation for his approach to the novel and then how it affected him as he read it.

"When I started to read Burning Sky I assumed that I would be looking at a fairly ‘conventional’ horror novel with a military theme – perhaps some kind of ‘creature feature’ that saw the TST members hunt down some occult or extra-terrestrial threat in the deserts of Afghanistan. But as I read on, it rapidly became clear that although there were elements of this, it was actually so much more than the sort of pot-boiler that often litters the genres. Instead, what Mr Ochse offers up is an open and starkly honest portrayal of the mental and physical costs of fighting in a modern conflict, which in turn becomes subtly integrated with elements of cosmic and body horror as time goes on."

When an author sits alone for months writing a novel in the squishy silence of his own brain, he never knows if what he's trying to do will actually translate to the page. Even as I sat in Afghanistan and began working with Rebellion's publicist, laying our scheme for sending out review copies of the book, I doubted myself and the idea that I might have captured the right electric pain in the bottle.

"Burning Sky is a fantastic novel that I enjoyed every minute of reading – engagingly written, sharply plotted and laced with both cosmic horrors and the entirely human-made horrors of modern war. I firmly believe that it represents the pinnacle of the military horror genre, and will be difficult, if not impossible, to surpass."

I urge you to read the review. I don't know who the reviewer was, but as an author who has had hundreds if not thousands of reviews, I can count on one hand the sorts of reviews that read like the best of creative non-fiction. This was one of them and should be a tutorial on how reviews should be written.

Burning Sky will be available September 25th. Please pre-order so we can sell out the print run before publication. That will help guarantee more books in the series. You can click on one of the book links on the left, or go to the following links for your favorite stores.

Thank you!