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A Thousand Distant Radios by Woody Skinner – A Book Review


If you haven’t heard of Woody Skinner, I suggest you familiarize yourself with him. He’s a Sherwood Anderson Fiction Award winner whose work has appeared in Another Chicago Magazine, Booth, The Carolina Quarterly, Mid-American Review, and more.

I recently had the pleasure of making Skinner’s acquaintance. After hearing his backstory and learning about his writing journey and successes, I felt inspired to read his short story collection called A Thousand Distant Radios.

The collection includes stories about an ill-fated marlin dumped into an extravagant couple’s backyard pool, a charismatic knife salesman traveling through a fanatical North American landscape, a young man in rural Arkansas who nestles into a satellite dish, and a grandfather’s body surrounded by oddments of a legendary Americana. Each story is singularly imaginative, portraying characters who are both unique and familiar, while focusing upon the disparate existences within “America.”

Put simply: I loved it.

I loved it because the book is extremely well written. Skinner obviously has a fantastic grasp of structure, word choice, pacing, and character. However, many “literary” authors tout these same skills. I loved it for an entirely different reason.

What sets Skinner apart from his literary peers is the sheer quirkiness of his stories. They zig every single time you think they are going to zag. Dare I say it, they’re frankly a little weird, which is in all honestly very high praise. I’ll heap one more compliment upon the previous: A Thousand Distant Radios comes within a a hair’s breath of being genre writing.

Let me name a few other literary authors who flirt dangerously with genre: Annie Proulx, Michael Chabon, Paul Auster, Tobias Wolff, and Raymond Carver. Oh, by the way, these are also some of my favorite writers. As I read A Thousand Distant Radios, I couldn’t help but feel that Skinner fits perfectly into this group of luminaries.

Woody Skinner is a relatively young writer with many, many years of excellence ahead of him. I cannot wait to read more of his work. Purchase your copy of A Thousand Distant Radios at Amazon or Barnes and Noble.

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The Banshees of Inisherin – A Movie Review

(Beware: I present no blatant spoilers, but it’s impossible to discuss the plot and theme of the movie without hinting at certain developments.)

I fell in love with The Banshees Of Inisherin within the first thirty minutes of the film. The beautiful scenery, the clothing, the pacing, the seemingly simple story, the utter relatability–I instantly adored it.

Those first thirty minutes were simply brilliant. Colin Farrell plays Pádraic Súilleabháin, a plain man who enjoys spending time with his best friend, Colm Doherty, played by Brendan Gleeson. Their friendship is uncomplicated. They walk to the pub. They drink at the pub. They chat at the pub.

The year is 1923, and Inisherin is an island off the coast of Ireland. At the start of the film, Pádraic calls upon Colm to go to the pub. But Colm no longer wants to be friends. Pádraic, a man of practical thoughts, is bewildered by both the sudden development as well as the blatant rudeness. After all, Pádraic is a nice man, a good lad, and glad of it.

Colm eventually explains to Pádraic that he’s wasted away enough of his days. He needs to do something substantive. He’s tired of Pádraic’s boring conversation and lifestyle. Colm is devoting himself entirely to music from that moment forth.

At that point of the movie, I got it. I totally understood Colm’s point of view. However, Colm got downright nasty about it, and managed to hurt Pádraic’s feelings time after time. Pádraic’s sister, played magnificently by Kerry Condon, tries to smooth things over but ultimately tells Pádraic to simply let it go.

Eventually, Pádraic let’s Colm know how he feels, and that he’s okay with being nice, and polite. and maybe even boring. He takes pride in it. His parents were nice. His sister is nice. It’s okay to be nice. Oh, boy. At that point, Pádraic won me over. I too suffer from being perhaps overly nice and I could totally relate to his words.

Again, to that point, the simplicity of the story truly spoke to me. I understood both characters’ motivations. I could relate to both of them. I liked them both, though I must admit I liked Pádraic a little more.

And then the movie took quite a turn–a disturbing turn, honestly. It was still funny, to be sure, but Colm became unreasonably belligerent, Pádraic gave in to a darkness unknown, and things ended rather bleakly. I still liked the movie, most definitely, but it lost that charm I enjoyed during those first thirty minutes.

Which, I believe, was entirely the point. I’m sure this has already been thoroughly explored by others, but I can’t help wondering if Colm and Pádraic’s relationship mirrored that of Ireland itself. I think it cannot be an accident that the Irish Civil War raged on the mainland as their friendship fell apart. Colm became absurdly cruel as he sought only to serve his ideology and eventually drew Pádraic into a shared depravity–Pádraic, a man who previously concerned himself with only being nice, who wanted no trouble, and whose patience seemed unending. Shockingly violent acts seemed to be ignored by Inisherin residents at best and enjoyed by them at worst.

And what is this movie saying about kindness? Is it destined to be tainted? Will the world devour the nice if they don’t eventually join in the brutality? Must one be mean to survive?

As you can see, The Banshees Of Inisherin made quite an impression upon me. I highly recommend it, as you probably guessed.

By the way, I’d like to praise Barry Keoghan. I’ve seen this actor in a few things now and he impresses me with every outing. I think he is destined for great things. In this film, he plays Dominic, a fairly unintelligent fellow with few redeeming qualities. However, Keoghan somehow makes him very likable, especially because he’s always displaying a changing facial expression to let you know exactly what Keoghan is thinking, or, more accurately in many cases, not thinking. It’s marvelous, honestly.

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Stella Maris by Cormac McCarthy – A Book Review

Stella Maris is a companion piece to The Passenger, both by Cormac McCarthy. The latter took great pains to position Alicia Western as an enigmatic, brilliant, and potentially insane character who happened to be the sister of Robert Western, The Passenger’s protagonist. In The Passenger, the reader experienced short vignettes of Alicia, often while being visited by “The Kid,” a supposed figment of her imagination. As The Passenger occurred in the early 1980s, Alicia was said to already be dead.

Stella Maris takes place in 1972, and Alicia is still very much alive. She has checked herself into Stella Maris, a mental health facility. The book itself is written in script format while using a back and forth conversation between Alicia and her doctor. As you probably know, McCarthy does not use quotation marks or apostrophes, and so this particular style could become confusing at times. However, overall, it proved fairly clear in regard to who was speaking.

First of all, I found the premise of the book very interesting. Taking a secondary character from a novel, albeit one who drove the plot in many ways, and making her the main character in a script could not be described as a conventional decision. Furthermore, seeing her lucid and speaking to another human being instead of the mysterious “Kid” provided insight to her actual character. In The Passenger, we could never quite be sure we were getting the real Alicia. In Stella Maris, we can’t quite be sure anything in The Passenger was entirely accurate, either.

Which brings me to the second thing I enjoyed most about Stella Maris. This book acts almost as a counterbalance to The Passenger. Some things are confirmed, some things are elaborated upon, yet some things are flatly contradicted. I had theories that The Passenger may not be what it seemed, and Stella Maris did much to reinforce such beliefs. Should Stella Maris take precedence over The Passenger in acting as our true guide to the overall story? It could all be in the title, right?

Finally, Alicia is a mathematical genius, and McCarthy sold me on that trait. Writers tend to utilize characters who are either English majors or writers themselves, because, of course, write what you know. When a writer tries to deliver a “genius” character with other aptitudes, it can come off as shallow at best and unbelievable at worst. McCarthy made me believe Alicia not only understood mathematics in a way almost no one else could, but that she truly lived it as a routine part of her life. Of course, I don’t know much about math, so he could have made it all up, which might actually have been even more impressive, but McCarthy seemed well-versed on what he discussed via Alicia.

In the end, I don’t know exactly what to think about both The Passenger or Stella Maris, other than I applaud the books for doing just that–making me think. While the books weren’t hard to read, they were, by design, hard to understand, which meant the reader had to read actively throughout. It’s been days since I finished The Passenger and I’m still thinking about it. I finished Stella Maris this morning and I’m sure it will also occupy space in my head for weeks to come.

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Ant-Man and The Wasp: Quantumania

I hate to admit it, but for the first time ever, I sat in a Marvel movie and thought, “This is really stupid.”

It pains me to say that, especially in regards to an Ant-Man movie featuring Paul Rudd, Evangeline Lilly, Jonathan Majors, Michelle Pfeiffer, and Michael Douglas–all of whom are very good actors.

Ant-Man began as an action comedy heist movie. He and his ants were absolutely the weirdest thing in an otherwise fairly grounded reality. When he appeared in other Marvel films, he was the fish out of water, the comedic relief, the guy who should never quite fit in with the other Avengers.

Quantumania changed all that. If you’ve seen the trailers, you know that Scott, Hope, Janet, Hank, and Cassie travel to the Quantum Realm, a subatomic universe free of the space-time continuum. Here everything is bonkers, nothing is explained, and CGI reigns supreme. I could never get a foot hold with Quantumania–it all looked so fake. None of the lifeforms made a lick of sense. There’s people. There’s “aliens.” There’s bugs. There’s living buildings. There are robots. How? How? How? Are we supposed to simply say “okay” to all of it? Even everyman Paul Rudd couldn’t make it work. His “weird” Ant-Man powers were tame compared to the rest of what occurred in the film.

The fact is they tried to usher in their new all encompassing “bad guy” in the wrong movie. Ant-Man is not the film for Kang the Conqueror to formally arrive. While Jonathan Majors crushed it (as he always does), his Kang is an extremely serious character who in no way, shape, or form worked on screen with Ant-Man. Kang said as much at one point in the film. And when they tried old-school Ant-Man humor, it fell totally flat. The tone of the film was all over the place.

Honestly, judging from the post-credits (both of them), you could skip Ant-Man and The Wasp: Quantumania and be just fine. It struck me as though it is not considered required viewing by Marvel itself.

Again, this was the first MCU film that really made me say, “Should I be spending so much on these tickets? Are these movies really worth it? Could I wait the 30 or 90 days for it to arrive at DisneyPlus?”

Though I believe Jonathan Majors to be an incredible actor, and though I believe Michelle Pfeiffer to be one of the best ever, the film’s bad writing, uneven story, disconnected setting, erratic tone, and overbearing CGI made Ant-Man and The Wasp: Quantumania a disappointment. Especially because they clearly shoehorned a promising villain into the wrong film.

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The Passenger by Cormac McCarthy – A Book Review

For those of you seeking a book full of adventure and a streamlined plot, I suggest you look elsewhere. However, if you’re fascinated by the unknowns of life and the external factors that can dictate the direction of our existence, The Passenger may be for you.

Written by Cormac McCarthy, who also brought us The Road, No Country For Old Men, and The Border Trilogy, The Passenger begins with an interesting premise. Set in the early 1980s, Robert Western is a salvage diver who must investigate a plane still full of people submerged in a lake. However, there’s a passenger missing with no explanation as to how. Because Robert witnessed this, entities begin to question him, pursue him, and even threaten him.

As Robert flees from something he doesn’t fully understand, we learn more about his complex relationship with his sister, his father’s role in modern warfare, his numerous and eccentric friendships, and his own eclectic past.

And for me, that’s the genius of the book. We often don’t know what is coming next in life. Many times, there are events occurring at both a national and global scale that can have incredible ramifications upon our own lives without us knowing it until after the fact. Though brilliant, Robert doesn’t fully understand what’s happening to him in the present or what his future holds, but he does regularly analyze his past and how it led to the present.

I mentioned Robert’s sister. Portions of The Passenger are dedicated to her as well. We get to experience her brilliance, her empathy, her kindness, and her supposed madness. My understanding is that Stella Maris, a book released in conjunction with The Passenger, focuses more so on Alicia Western, Robert’s sister. Of course, I’ll read that next.

At 89 years of age, Cormac McCarthy may be thinking about what comes next. He might also be looking back at his long life and reflecting on things. Those ideas can’t help but influence my interpretation of The Passenger. I initially thought The Passenger referred to the missing person from the downed plane, but now I believe The Passenger refers to Robert Western himself, and all of us, really, as we are simply along for the ride during our allotted years upon this planet.

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Listen To “George Winthrop Jr. Park”

When Ben and his friends notice an old man staring at their children in the splash park, he decides a confrontation is in order. But the old man has his reasons, and those reasons will resonate with you.

Listen to “George Winthrop Jr Park” at Podbean, Amazon Music, or by using the player below. If you prefer to read, check it out in my short story collection called Happy, Sad, Funny, Mad.

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Immortals Fenyx Rising – A Few Thoughts

As you remember, I was crazy for The Legend Of Zelda: Breath Of the Wild. In fact, once that game ended, I immediately began researching games of similar play and feel.

Immortals Fenyx Rising kept coming up as a possibility on several lists. It wasn’t rated the highest, nor was it rated the lowest.

I discovered some pretty good sales on Immortals Fenyx Rising for the Nintendo Switch. Honestly, at such a low price, I figured it was worth the risk. I placed my order.

Even through the first several hours of the game frustrated me to no end, I ended up absolutely adoring Immortals Fenyx Rising. It satisfied me just as much as Breath Of the Wild, and in many ways–even more. Let me tell you why.

Story: I’m a sucker for Greek mythology. Fenyx Rising centers on Greek myth, and though I don’t believe it’s based on any one particular myth, it references dozens of them throughout. Best of all? It creates a few myths of its own. The general premise focuses on Typhon, a mad monster out to destroy the gods and man. A lone soldier, Fenyx, must aid the gods and rally them in his final battle against the evil creature if he is to save humanity as he knows it. Speaking of “he” …

Customization: Fenyx doesn’t have to be a “he.” Fenyx can also be a “she.” You can choose Fenyx’s gender, skin color, hair color, eye color, hair style, face paint–and more. I loved that Fenyx is many different things to different players. Furthermore, as the game progresses, you can capture all kinds of armor, weaponry, wings, and helmets that are also customizable. It’s really, really fun to change the main character’s “look” any time you feel like it.

Battles: I struggled for a long time in the beginning of this game when it came to battles. It took me forever to defeat even the simplest of enemies. As the game continued, however, I began to realize how to capture more powerful weaponry, how to increase weapons’ ability to inflict damage, how to bolster my own health, and how to increase my armor’s defenses. I’ll admit there’s a steep learning curve with the controls, but once you’ve got them down, they’ll be like second nature to you. By the time I beat the game, I had my character, his weapons, health, stamina, armor, and helmets so overpowered that I could blow through enemies easily.

Myth Challenges: Again, it took me awhile to catch on, but eventually I realized solving the myth challenges enabled Fenyx to power up. It’s not a one-to-one situation, everything is a process in this game, but you definitely want to engage in the myth challenges as quickly as possible.

Far Sight: I didn’t start using far sight until over half way through the game, and that was a huge mistake. Far sight enables you to locate and mark treasure chests and vaults. Vaults allow you to collect Zeus’ lightning, which allows you to increase your stamina. Chests help you collect jewels that allow you to increase your power. Some chests provide new weapons and helmets. It’s a cool tool that will ultimately help you achieve success.

The Golden Isle: The Golden Isle is the complete world of Fenyx Rising. It’s divided into different realms, and each of those realms is special to certain gods. It is a huge landscape of every terrain and environment imaginable. If you enjoyed the huge, open world format of Breath Of the Wild, you’ll love The Golden Isle.

The Design: I think the design of the gods, the clothing, the monsters, the landscapes, the weapons, the animals, the architecture–to me, it’s all gorgeous. It’s just a beautiful looking game.

Frankly, I’m amazed this game isn’t more popular than it is. There are so many different things to do in Fenyx Rising–it’s constantly challenging and rewarding the player. I honestly loved it. If you like big open world games like Breath Of the Wild, I unabashedly recommend Immortals Fenyx Rising.

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Why Should You Read My New Book?

“So you’ve got a new book out. Big deal, Foley. So does everyone and their dog. Why should I read it?”

Fair question. As an avid reader myself, I’m very particular about what amount of time I’ll allocate to what book. For those who don’t read fiction regularly, that time is even more precious.

The bottom line is this: I’ve loved super heroes, mythologies, and legends my entire life. I’ve admired epic series like The Dark Tower (King), The Lord Of the Rings (Tolkien), and especially The Chronicles Of Narnia (Lewis). Greek mythology, Roman mythology, King Arthur–these are things that have always fascinated me. As a result, I began fashioning my own heroes, legends, and comic books while still in elementary school. In fact, some of the characters in my latest book are versions of those early attempts.

The Chronicles of Purgatory Station is my love letter to everything mentioned above. This six-book series is also my take on the super hero genre. It’s my exploration into the moralities of heroes, the complexities of “evil,” and the very nature of the universe–time, space, and physics.

As I said, I created some of these characters when I was literally a child. In the beginning, they were clearly derivative of the popular icons of the era. However, as time marched on, my worldview grew more sophisticated, and so did my characters. In the beginning, they will seem quite conventional. As the series unfolds, though, they will change. Some for the better … some for the worse.

Why do good people do bad things? What makes someone truly “evil?” Is “good” and “evil” merely the construct of a society’s perspective, or does the universe itself recognize “right” versus “wrong?” These questions intrigue me–they always have and always will.

In fact, mythologies, legends, and super heroes have consistently been a community’s means of exploring complicated issues. It’s human nature to investigate an idea through thought, imagining, and story. The Chronicles Of Purgatory Station continues that tradition.

This all sounds pretty heady, doesn’t it? Trust me, The Chronicles Of Purgatory Station can be read simply as an action/adventure story as well. The concepts I’ve discussed certainly exist in the writing, but providing a good story is my perpetual goal. In my opinion, a story should be engaging, fast-paced, and universally applicable. I want every single one of my readers to be able to see themselves in some aspect of my stories and, as a result, make it a part of their own reality. I also want them to stay up too late at night reading my work because they can’t put it down; each page needs to urge the reader forward. If my reader doesn’t really care what happens next, then I’ve failed.

So … that’s why I think you should read my book.

You can get your copy at Amazon or Barnes and Noble.

You can also take a look at many of my characters here.

Thanks for reading. Let me know what you think.