Daniel Jolley a reviewer for amazon was kind enough to offer up the following review of my latest work
Review by Daniel Jolley
The Curse of Mesphisto's Seed: The Day of the Awakening was a tantalizing introduction to an epic battle between good and evil waged, for the most part, on Earth. The Apocalypse of Silence builds strongly upon the events and people of the previous novel, placing the overall storyline in a much more focused and crowd-pleasing light and granting readers further visions of hell itself. This second novel is a much more impressive, polished piece of fiction than its predecessor, showing how much author William P. Haynes has grown as a writer in a very short time. It also, by the end, shifts the Mesphisto's Seed series onto a higher plane as the nature of the struggle changes dramatically in the book's latter moments.
In The Apocalypse of Silence, Haynes takes you immediately to hell. The heroes of the first novel have been taken prisoner by the devil and sentenced to death for their "crimes." Mark Talbot, who gained unworldly powers after his "death" (in the first book) finds himself momentarily stripped of those powers, but he, his new wife Anne, best friend Josh Riley, and Riley's companion Peggy are never to be found without a trick or two up one of their sleeves, and they effect a breakout – but only after coming face to face, individually, with their most private fears. Unlike what readers found in the first novel, the devil rather than Elliott himself is the true antagonist in these pages, and as such we learn much more about him and his ways than we knew before – such as the fact that he spends some of his days in human form and that he can be, if not blinded, certainly distracted by an obsession that might be considered love in a different context.
You don't leave hell and return to Earth without paying a price. In this case, our heroes find that some twenty years have passed in their world, years in which devilish doppelgangers have gone about making messes of their lives. Their unity is sorely tested, particularly as one of them has no memory of the group's past struggles with evil, at a most inopportune time. The devil's plans for a silent apocalypse are very much in motion, and only Mark, Josh, and the others stand a chance at stopping it. Some wonderful new characters are introduced (including Death and her acolyte), adding a richer dimension to the storyline, and the ending comes with a couple of surprises that totally redefine the nature of everything that has already happened and will happen in the future.
I think the plot takes on a more mythological air in the pages of this second book, and not only with the addition of Nox (Death) into the mix. The implication is that this is not a new conflict at all, but rather a restaging of an epic battle between good and evil that has been waged before. Given the nature of the ending, it's hard for me to predict how and where the story will go in the upcoming third book of the series – and that certainly serves to whet my appetite for what is to come.
Forced to put the schooner Heimdall into dry-dock for repairs and modifications, the crew chooses to holiday in Southern Utah so they can rendezvous with the Professor, a brilliant confidant from Rabat. What he shares at the summit stuns the crew and
Boom! Pain! Blackness!
After an RPG attack on their barracks in Afghanistan, corpsmen, Amber Fox, Luke Owens , Wade Scott and Ross Miller wake up in an Army hospital in Germany.
Thus, begins a months long recovery for all of them. A
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