Showing results by narrator "Brandon Massey" in All Categories

Real musicians don’t sign autographs, date models, or fly in private jets. They spend their lives in practice rooms and basement clubs or toiling in the obscurity of coffee-shop gigs, casino jobs, and the European festival circuit. The 10 linked stories in Power Ballads are devoted to this unheard virtuoso: the working musician. From the wings of sold-out arenas to hip-hop studios to polka bars, these stories are born out of a nocturnal world where music is often simply work, but also where it can, in rare moments, become a source of grace and transcendence, speaking about the things we never seem to say to one another.

Living in St. Jude, a 110-year-old dying city on the edge of the Mississippi, is tough. But when a letter informs 14-year-old Cinque Williams of the passing of the father he never met, he is faced with an incomplete past and an uncertain future. A curse meant for his father condemns Cinque to a slow death even as it opens his eyes to the strange otherworld around him. With help from the ghost Willy T, an enigmatic White Woman named Iku, an African Loa, and a devious shape-shifter, Cinque gathers the tools to confront the ghost of his dead father. But he will learn that sometimes too much knowledge can be dangerous.

Do you want more? More hope, more joy, more fun and more fulfillment? Change is the essence of life; the biggest, most meaningful, and dramatic differences in our lives-and in our world-are really just the result of a series of small, seemingly insignificant changes. "Amazing changes can occur in the most surprisingly small amounts of time," says Allyson Lewis, author and senior executive at a major financial services firm.

Heraclix was dead and Pomp was immortal. That was before Heraclix’s reanimation (along with the sewn-together pieces and parts of many other dead people) and Pomp’s near murder at the hands of an evil necromancer. As they travel from Vienna to Prague to Istanbul and back again (with a side-trip to Hell), they struggle to understand who and what they are: Heraclix seeks to know the life he had before his death and rebirth, and Pomp wrestles with the language and meaning of mortality.

David Holbrook is a scrawny kid, the victim of bullies, and the neglected son of insane parents. David Holbrook is the Kallis Episkopos, a vicious murderer turned imprisoned leader of a death cult dedicated to Eris, the Hellenic goddess of discord. David Holbrook never killed anyone, and lives a lonely and luckless existence with his aging mother in a tumbledown New Jersey town. Caught between finger and trigger, David is given three chances to decide his fate as he is compelled to live and relive all his potential existences, guided only by the dark wisdom found in a bottle of cough syrup.

Matt Connell, a formerly successful literary agent who’s been in prison for four years for a crime of passion—homicide by strangulation after learning his wife slept with a friend—receives an early release from Sing Sing to join an FBI undercover investigation of multiple murders in Manhattan. Killings continue to mount as Matt does his best to calm his “Ferrari brain”—a condition in which his mind accelerates wildly into negative thoughts and worst-case scenarios—even as he falls in love with a suspect, then discovers disturbing truths about his past and hers.