Friday, October 12, 2012

Blog Tour: Hellfire and Damnation II by Connie Corcoran Wilson

This virtual book tour is presented by Teddy Rose at Virtual Author Book Tours.
Click HERE to see the tour schedule.
Welcome to The Wormhole and my day on the tour.
It is my pleasure to feature:
Connie Corcoran Wilson and Hellfire and Damnation II.
About Connie Corcoran Wilson:
Connie (Corcoran) Wilson (MS + 30) graduated from the University of Iowa and Western Illinois University, with additional study at Northern Illinois, the University of California at Berkeley and the University of Chicago. She taught writing at six Iowa/Illinois colleges and has written for five newspapers and seven blogs, including Associated Content (now owned by Yahoo) which named her its 2008 Content Producer of the Year . She is an active, voting member of HWA (Horror Writers Association).
Her stories and interviews with writers like David Morrell, Joe Hill, Kurt Vonnegut, Frederik Pohl and Anne Perry have appeared online and in numerous journals. Her work has won prizes from “Whim’s Place Flash Fiction,” “Writer’s Digest” (Screenplay) and she will have 12 books out by the end of the year. Connie reviewed film and books for the Quad City Times (Davenport, Iowa) for 12 years and wrote humor columns and conducted interviews for the (Moline, Illinois) Daily Dispatch and now blogs for 7 blogs, including television reviews and political reporting for Yahoo.
Connie lives in East Moline, Illinois with husband Craig and cat Lucy, and in Chicago, Illinois, where her son, Scott and daughter-in-law Jessica and their three-year-old twins Elise and Ava reside. Her daughter, Stacey, recently graduated from Belmont University in Nashville, Tennessee, as a Music Business graduate and is currently living and working in Australia.
Description of Hellfire & Damnation II:
Publisher: Merry Blacksmith Press, August 1, 2012 Category: Short Stories, Psychological Thriller
Tour Dates: October, 2012 Available in: Print, Kindle, Epub & PDF, 168 pages
Cover Art by Vincent Chong.
Hellfire & Damnation II is the sequel to the well-received  award-winning short story collection Hellfire& Damnation(www.HellfireAndDamnationTheBook.com) (E-Lit award, Silver Feather award). The first collection contained 15 short stories that described the sins punished at each of the 9 Circles of Hell within Dante’s Inferno. With that framing device and an Introduction by William F. Nolan (Logan’s Run), the 2011 visit to Hell was 47,000 words that critics called “blazingly original.”
The sequel, Hellfire & Damnation II, is slightly longer, at 53,000 words, containing 11 short stories that, once again, address the sins punished at each of the 9 Circles of Hell. Plus, this time, there is an illustration for each story and a From the Author section, which describes the inspiration for each story. [There are no recurring characters, however, so no need to have read the first book in order to plunge into the second.]

My thoughts:
     To begin this short piece on my thoughts of the book Hellfire and Danmantion II, I just have to state that I have never before been so effected by the introduction in a book.  I was struck by the very first phrase and by the time I had finished reading the intro, there was absolutely NO way that I would not read this book.  I actually went on-line and bought a copy of book one as I had not read that yet.  The introduction was so well written that I just knew the book would be even better.
     I was not disappointed.  This collection of short stories is fabulous.  The writing is wonderful; the word selection, the pacing, the structure, everything just works.  Her writing draws you in emotionally and you feel as if you are a part of it all.  The characters are first rate, in all of the stories.  She mixes humor with the horror in just the right doses.  

Click HERE to buy a copy of Hellfire and Damnation II 

Click HERE to buy a copy of Hellfire and Damnation (book one)
Click HERE to go to the website for book one.