Guest Blog with Karl Larew

Today I would like to welcome my first guest blogger, Author Karl Larew. Next week I will also be doing an interview and give away with him, so stay tuned. Before I turn things over, I would like to thank Karl for for contacting me about his book and am excited to learn more about it. Now without further ado, Karl take it away. 

     Hello, anybody, and thanks to Charlotte for this blog.  I am a semi-retired history professor specializing in military history but also interested in a lot of fields—I once published a scholarly article on the image of women in 1940s comic books!  I am also passionate about most sorts of music, including, oddly enough, both the ancient opera tenor, Enrico Caruso (died 1921), and the ancient hillbilly singer, Jimmie Rodgers (died 1933). 

     I have six novels for sale on Amazon, Kindle, Smashwords, and Nook.  Three make up a family saga covering the WWII, Korean, and Cold War/Vietnam eras (but each can be read as stand-alones); two are spoofs on James Bond/vampire/werewolf stories.  The sixth novel is “Candles in the Window,” about the sex lives of college kids in the 1950s.  I first published it in 1999, but have recently put out a new edition.  Readers have noted this book’s nostalgia value, but, more especially, its accuracy in portraying the 1950s, for example, the horror of homosexuality typical of that decade.  The reviewer in the Baltimore Sun was so struck by the book’s realism that he refused to believe it was fiction but rather a memoir.  (It’s fiction. Mostly.)

     I value honesty in writing. Though “Candles” has a certain mythological aspect, I’ve tried, with the help of Freud and other influences, to do what Lawrence Durrell did in his Alexandria Quartet; that is, show the different ways in which one character can appear to those around her (her in this case being an extraordinarily beautiful and talented, but enigmatic young woman nick-named “Silky”). Readers who look for the various layers of interpretation built into this book will wonder about the psychological questions raised, about homosexuality, for example, especially in the mind of the college priest; and about emotional quasi-incest, especially in the lives of the female characters.

     Yours truly, Karl Larew.