Wednesday, September 7, 2011

Summer's over! Back at it!

~ The kids are back in school and the red edged leaves of the sugar maples outside my office window  are hinting at Fall. Alas!  My summer vacation has come to an end.  What better way to get back to the work of writing than with a book review, a little tease and an author interview?  No better way I say! So here we go. Hope you enjoy it.  ~ Rebecca




Mindbenders
 by Ted Krever

They are called Mindbenders - men and women who know your every thought. They  have the power to control your emotions, manipulate your memories, your body and the world around you.  When the possibilities are endless, who will draw the line between what is right and what is unspeakable evil?

Greg is a man who can’t remember, cut off from his memories.   While Greg’s body survived the war in Iraq, his mind remains a fractured tangle of the sights and sounds of past battles and lost comrades.

Max Renn can never forget.  A human weapon and Cold War  leftover, Renn can read minds, move mountains – even plant ideas and emotions into another’s head.  What he cannot do is escape the past- no matter how far or how long he may run. To live in Hell is hearing every thought, feeling every emotion, experiencing every lived moment and memory of every person around you.  Max Renn is a permanent resident.
When Dave Monaghan, caretaker to lost souls and a former director for the US cold war mind control project is murdered, the uneasy peace Gregg and Renn had found in Dave’s Florida everglades safe haven is shattered.  Thrust into a world of international conspiracy and paranormal warfare, Greg and Renn race to gather Dave’s old team of Mindbenders in a fight to stop an insidious evil bent on world domination. 

For Gregg it is about vengeance- vengeance for Dave.  Someone murdered his friend and  that Someone was going to pay.

For Renn it is about answers.  Who had killed Dave Monaghan and why?  Who were these Others, new Mindbenders with inferior abilities and murderous intentions?  And what did an assassination of the Indian Prime minister, a sabotaged nuclear power plant in New York and a disgraced international leader have in common?  The mind control program is back in play and they are coming for Max Renn.


Mindbenders is a fast paced thriller with broad audience appeal.  There is a literary hint to Krever’s writing without the prose being over burdened by heavy word choice and turn of phrase.  I enjoyed the dark and brooding look back to a time passed.  This glimpse into the era  of spies and intrigue and old-fashioned espionage lends a noir overlay to an otherwise  hedonistic, modern thrill ride.  Krever’s fully developed characters seep quietly into your head and set up house, begging you to read on well into the small and quiet hours of the night.   

The rule to telling a good story, like a good lie, is adding a healthy dose of truth and Mindbenders is no exception.  Krever skillfully balances the ingredients to good story telling- a sprinkle of fact, a body of fiction and viola!  A nightmare of believable proportions.  In this age of hidden terror behind everyday faces, Mindbenders promises a fantastic paranormal underbelly to a humdrum existence.  Pick up Krever’s Mindbenders and expand the horizons of the Possible.  After all- the mind is a terrible thing to waste.  If you don’t use it someone else might.
 ~


This past July I attended the International Thriller Writer’s ThrillerFest at the Grand Hyatt in New York City.  The week was packed with brilliant authors, inspiring talks and new friends.  I met author Ted Krever by happenstance, in a small alcove set back from the busy miasma of words, inspiration and networking.  He was kind enough to befriend a girl who had no idea how to mingle.  He has continued that friendship despite my neuroticism and writing temper tantrums. 

Ted has graciously agreed to an interview about his book Mindbenders, a paranormal thriller.  I hope you enjoy the next few posts where Ted and I discuss his novel, the process of writing, living a writer’s life and the fate of the publishing industry. 

(Note- for the purposes of this series of interviews I am RM and the fabulous Ted Krever is KREVER­ - obviously.  (It really is a necessary step in the rock star writing world after all:  to be known by only one name.)

RM:  I have the fantastic opportunity to interview you today - the Ted Krever, author of Mindbenders and my friend.  Wish it was over a bottle of wine or coffee and face to face but I guess we can make this IM thing work.

KREVER:  Go ahead, you start.  You’re Walter Cronkite and I'm Rocky the flying squirrel

RM:  I always loved Rocky.

KREVER:  Me too.  I loved Boris and Natasha—I wonder if that’s where Renn came from?  That’s a weird thought.

RM:  I was just wondering that myself.  Are you mindbending me?

KREVER:  I told you it was real. Seriously. 

RM:  Well, at Thriller Fest, I was standing in the market in Grand Central wishing someone I knew would come and have lunch with me and suddenly there you were- with chocolate!

KREVER:  It was very good chocolate.

RM:  Really good chocolate.  Must be a writer thing.  You have been writing for quite a long time, in one fashion or another.  Can you give us a quick background? 

KREVER:  I grew up in New Jersey, moved around some as an adult. I’ve worked in television and Internet production, including at ABC News, as a prep cook in an Italian restaurant, associate manager of a revival house movie theater, a local newspaper reporter and a mattress salesman. But in writing fiction, all that matters really is a skeptical eye on the world and a way with words. People can get a sense of those things from my website or—better—from the excerpts of the books available on Amazon, BN.com or Smashwords.

RM:  Mindbenders is selling well on Amazon.  You have received positive reviews from the likes of Thomas F. Monteleone and F. Paul Wilson, both NY Times bestsellers.   Readers say they enjoy the fast paced action and developed characters. 
I found myself deeply invested in the story from the very beginning.  The story of Greg, a Iraq war vet living, or trying to live, with PTSD and Renn, a “leftover” from the Cold War era coming together to fight the age old war between what is right and what is easy was both thrilling and frightening.  How did you approach the idea for his novel?
KREVER:  Characters always come first for me. I got a letter from a woman who got the book on a Goodreads giveaway, saying her son had been home from Iraq for ten years and was still struggling with PTSD, that she found the book disturbing but very accurate about that. That meant a lot to me, because I worried more about that aspect of the story than any other. Greg and Max have in some ways very complementary problems. Greg can’t remember his history because of the PTSD and Max has no history, having been raised as a genetic experiment by the KGB. A lot of the book is tied up in the question: how differently would you view people if you really knew what they were thinking?
RM:  The themes of war and a global reach to politics, the idea that so few could effect so many with what seemed like a whim and the fear that accompanies feeling vulnerable and helpless resonate with me both as a child during the Cold War and a parent today.  Do you think that, somewhere in your subconscious, growing up during the Cold War had anything to do with the themes you choose to write about?

KREVER:  Actually, I think this is very much a post-9/11 book. I think one of the interesting things about it is the way the old Cold War lines get jumbled-up. Both Max’s team and the bad guys include members from both sides, people who would have been bitter enemies twenty years ago. If anyone wants to read into that some message about the absurdity of all our conflicts, I won’t object.

RM:  9/11 is something very much on the American mind, especially this week with the tenth anniversary coming up this weekend. 

In Mindbenders, Max Renn and his team posses the ability to read minds and manipulate the world around him using the power of his thoughts—his mind.  Did this novel come from any past experience or fascination with psychic phenomenon?

KREVER:  Not from any particular psychic experience of my own, no.  My son wanted a superhero and I made up a mindreader because I didn’t want a guy in tights.  When he went home to his mom that night, I started thinking, 'this could be interesting if I could find the right angle for it.'  I did a little research and stumbled upon remote viewing, the fact that the US Government funded a mind control program for 18 years.  And then the revelation that the Soviet program began much earlier was more serious and considered much more successful.  Once I stumbled onto that, I had Renn.

RM:  And so Renn was born.

KREVER:  Now this is about ten years ago. Renn first appears as a secondary character in a literary novel I wrote, which is probably one reason my literary novels never sold.
But when I finished that book, instead of patting myself on the back, I found myself thinking, "I've got to give this guy his own story. He's my Sherlock Holmes." And then it took me years to get loose enough to do him justice.

RM:  Let’s talk about your character Greg.  Mindbenders is told in the first person-Greg’s point of view.  While Renn appears as a secondary character early into the book, Renn quickly moves to stand shoulder to shoulder with Greg.  How did that come about?

KREVER:  Renn is certainly the main character. But Greg is a necessity. My first attempts at writing Renn were first person –from inside his head—and that just didn't work. The guy hears every thought for three blocks around all the time. So it was impossible to do him justice. The background noise at any given moment would overwhelm the story.

RM:  You had to tell Max Renn’s story from the outside. 

KREVER:  So Greg was a practical decision. I realized I needed Watson. Watson is the most important guy in the Sherlock Holmes stories because he's the one who asks, "Holmes, how did you deduce the details of his life with such uncanny accuracy?" which gives Sherlock the opportunity to tell us.  But Greg is also to some extent my son, who has a serious case of Asperger’s - and the Vietnam vets who lived across the street and had a hard time focusing on anything for any length of time because part of them was always back in the jungle, hearing whispering in the trees and the guns pounding inside their heads all the time.

RM:  In many ways I saw Greg as a vehicle for other stories. I find it interesting the story is told fromGreg’s point of view when he seems to function as a container, a whiteboard for other people’s emotions and experiences. What did Renn call him?

KREVER:  Greg is a receptor.   He can pick up brainwaves if the frequency is a match.  Renn makes the point that most people can be receptors under the right circumstances

RM:  A receptor, yes. But Greg’s own emotions, his own head is on lock down, at least from himself.

KREVER:  He's locked away from himself, yes. That's the PTSD.  His life is a mystery that he feels, not unnaturally, that he has to try to unlock. But he's forgotten the connecting threads. He remembers details but not how they fit together.

RM:  I don't get the feeling he wants to unlock it, only that he feels he should want to unlock it.

KREVER:  I think, through most of this book, he’s just glad to be functioning. He's been existing on the most basic level for so long that all this tumult is still an improvement.  I think it takes him most of the book to take seriously the thought that you might be able to find yourself. But that thought is the first step to doing it.


Part Two - Author Ted Krever and I discuss the writer’s life.
Part Three - Author Ted Krever and I discuss the changing climate of publishing and independant publishing.

Ted Krever’s books can be found here at Amazon.com, here at Goodreads.com and here at BarnesandNobel.com

For more information about Ted Krever please visit www.tedkrever.com