Sunday, November 29, 2015

Buy These Books. Or I'll Shoot My Dog.

Besides editing books for other folks and reviewing a slew of them, I've written a couple myself.  Both are still in print and continue to sell (I consider the modest royalties to be beer money), they've gotten pretty decent reviews, and couldn't be more different. 
There's A House In The Land (Where A Band Can Take A Stand) is fact thinly disguised as fiction.
A character in the Doonesbury comic strip once called the 1970s "A kidney stone of a decade,' and compared to the 1960s and 1970s it was. It also was a time of bad hair and bad music, but none of this mattered to the mutant tribe who lived on a farm in Philadelphia's far western suburbs that at first glance would seem to have been one of the communes ubiquitous during
that era but most definitely was not. There's a House In The Land is the story of that tribe, that farm and an extraordinarily magical time. 
Wrote one critic of this 2014 book:
"The Seventies were the shore the Sixties washed up on.  Those who climbed out of the surf were left to rebuild the American Dream, shredded by Vietnam, JFK, MLK, THC and LSD.  Who knows how many such islands of self-reliance and rugged individualism there were in America, but few had in residence an amanuensis as talented as Shaun Mullen.  He shows that while American rules were shattered, American values persevered." 
Then there's The Bottom of the Fox: A True Story of Love, Devotion & Cold-Blooded Murder.
This hard-edged investigative report focuses on Eddie Joubert, a Teamster truck drive whose midlife crisis had arrived right on schedule. He fell hard for the Poconos, a resort area in Pennsylvania where he bought a rundown tavern that became a magnet for an eclectic clientele that ranged from world-class jazz musicians to bikers to returning Vietnam War veterans. But the Poconos held a dark secret. When Joubert was hacked to death in 1981, it was yet another in a series of gruesome unsolved murders involving people whom the authorities cared little about. The Bottom of the Fox lays bare that secret for the first time while revealing how evil doers could literally get away with murder. 
Wrote one critic:
"The Bottom of the Fox is a must-read role model for aspiring writers and reporters. Mullen is a world-class writer -- you can accurately call him 'Hemingwayesque' -- who tells a shocking tale of people literally getting away with murder. It's almost impossible to find books these days written with such solid reporting and in a disciplined and compressed style that for once deserves the now trite word 'awesome.' "
Both books are available in trade paperback and Kindle editions. Click HERE for There's A House and HERE for The Bottom of the Fox.

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