Tag: books

The following is an excerpt from one of the many hilarious stories in LawDog’s second straight bestseller, THE LAWDOG FILES: AFRICAN ADVENTURES.

SQUEAKS, Part 1

Many, MANY moons ago—and don’t even ask, ’cause I won’t tell you—when I was still a pup, the family lived in Nigeria. We had a bungalow at the Odibo Estates, out near the Biafran border. Every evening peddlers, called traders, used to walk up and down the main road, offering various knick-knacks and merchandise for sale or trade.
Ali Cheap-Cheap was one of the busier traders, and he spent a lot of time on our front porch haggling with Mom. Now, Ali Cheap-Cheap was very proud of his ability to acquire just about anything you might want or need.
One evening, Mom was visiting on the front porch with the visiting wife of one of the English engineers. Said wife had never been outside of London before, and as a consequence, she loathed Africa. She and Mom were chattering and griping when along came Ali Cheap-Cheap. Old Ali Cheap-Cheap didn’t have anything that Mom or the English lady wanted, so, before he wandered off, he asked if, “Madams want for anything?”
The English lady got a funny look in her eye, tapped her snake-hide purse and said, “I want one of these.” “Yes, madam,” replied Ali, and off he trotted.
About three weeks later, Mom and her new English friend were on the front porch again, when along came Ali Cheap-Cheap. With a friend. Ali and friend had a cane pole slung over their shoulders, and there was a burlap bag hanging from said pole.
Now, at this point I should mention that also on the front porch, in addition to the two ladies, was a Mongoose-a-minium, in which lived our pet kusimanse, or as it is known to science, Helogale parvula, the pygmy mongoose. This Mongoose-a-minium had a Plexiglas ceiling which Dad had assured us was unbreakable.
Riiiight.
Up to the porch came Ali Cheap-Cheap and his buddy.
Mom was eyeing the burlap bag with some trepidation, having had some nasty experiences with what the locals tended to store in burlap bags, when Ali and buddy proudly lifted it and announced to the English lady, “Oh, madam! We have your beef!”
I should interject here that “beef” is bush slang for any animal.
Wait for it.
Mom had risen to her full height, and was about to order Ali to get his beef away from her house, when Squeaker, our pygmy mongoose, wandered out of his apartment, and screamed in sheer outrage. It was always amazing how much sheer volume that little hairball could put out. Ali and his buddy were startled by the shriek and dropped the burlap sack onto the Plexiglass roof of Squeaker’s residence.
The unbreakable glass promptly shattered and caused the burlap sack and its contents to fall into the Mongoose-a-minium. It turned out that inside said sack was one observably scared 15-foot python.
Squeaker, who was about the size and girth of a tennis ball, offered up a brief prayer to the Mongoose God for the meal he was about to partake of, and latched onto the snake’s tail with tooth and claw.
The snake discovered that he has been dumped into a place which reeks of mongoose, panicked and attempted to slide up the side of the Mongoose-a-minium and down onto the porch, but was hindered in doing so by Squeaker, who was not only still firmly attached to the python’s tail, but was bracing all four legs against the wall to prevent his meal from getting away.
Did I mention that the snake was approximately fifteen feet long?
Squeaker didn’t even slow him down.
The python hit the porch floor with Squeaks gnawing away at his tail like a chipmunk on speed, and noticed that, in the interest of ventilation, the sliding glass door in the front of our house was open about six inches.
Yep. You guessed it. In goes the snake.
Now, Dad and one of his Brit buddies named Tom were sitting in the house, drinking whiskey-and-sodas. Tom looked down and saw several yards of snake whip by, shrieked, and made a flat-footed, sitting-down leap all the way from the sofa to the top of the bar. Whereupon he proceeded to utter genteel curses upon all and sundry at the top of his lungs.
Dad looked down, lifted his feet, ensured that his drink didn’t tip over, and watched the snake haul scales with bemused interest. Dad didn’t ruffle easily.
And yes, things just got crazier from there. If you haven’t acquired a copy of LawDog’s African adventures yet, you really must. It’s genuinely THAT funny.

LawDog had the honor of representing law and order in the Texas town of Bugscuffle as a Sheriff’s Deputy, where he became notorious for, among other things, the famous Case of the Pink Gorilla Suit. But long before he put on the deputy’s star, he grew up in Nigeria, where his experiences were equally unforgettable. In AFRICAN ADVENTURES, LawDog chronicles his encounters with everything from bush pilots, 15-foot pythons, pygmy mongooses, brigadier-captains, and Peace Corp hippies to the Nigerian space program.
THE LAWDOG FILES: AFRICAN ADVENTURES are every bit as hilarious as the previous volume, as LawDog relates his unforgettable experiences in a laconic, self-deprecating manner that is funny in its own right. Africa wins again, and again, and again, but, so too does the reader in this sobering, but hilarious collection of true tales from the Dark Continent.
Already a #1 category bestseller!
From the reviews:

• Better than the first! Only two authors have ever made me laugh so much and so hard that I had to put the book down to finish later. One is Terry Pratchett, and the other is LawDog. I made it to the Independence Day story and was laughing so hard I couldn’t see the words.
• Not for anyone who is recovering from abdominal surgery. Seriously. I’m in pain. I don’t think any stitches broke, but OWww. Still an hour before I can have another pain pill.
• I had a hard time imagining how he could top those stories. But the new ‘African Adventures’ is even more enjoyable than expected. Even more than the first LawDog Files, this one is packed with absolutely hilarious stories.

Because I’ve been editing LawDog literally all day in preparation for the upcoming release of his unforgettable African Adventures, I don’t have much intellectual energy left for posting. So, I’ll leave you instead with one of his stories from The LawDog Files, that, if less amusing than most, is no less worth reading.

“Car 12, County.”

“Go ahead, 12.”

“I’ve an open door at 1201 Second Street. Public service the Williams and see if they can put an eyeball on Dot.”

There’s more than a touch of amusement in dispatch’s voice as she replies, “10-4, 12. You want me to roll you some backup?”

Minx.

“Negative, County,” I said as I stepped into the front hall of the Conroe and Conroe Funeral Home, “I’ll be on the portable.”

A dollar will get you a doughnut that I was going to find the same thing I’d found the last umpteen Open Door calls we’d gotten here, but I was well aware that Murphy hated my guts—personally. So my P7 was hidden behind my leg, finger indexed along the frame as I shined my Surefire through the business office, the guest rooms, multiple viewing rooms, the Icky Room, casket storage, finally to be slipped back into the holster as I found the small, slim figure sitting all alone in the chapel.

Dot Williams was dressed in her standard uniform of hot pink sneakers, blue jeans, and Hello Kitty sweatshirt, one foot swinging idly as she gravely regarded the awful plastic gold-painted, flower-adorned abstract sculpture stuck to the wall behind the altar. In honor of the evening’s football game, a red-and-black football was painted on one cheek, and red and silver ribbons had been threaded into her ever-present ponytail.

Eleven years ago, a college kid with a one-ton Western Hauler pickup truck and a blood alcohol concentration of 0.22 packed the Chevy S-10 driven by the hugely pregnant Mrs. Williams into a little bitty mangled ball and bounced it across Main Street. The Bugscuffle Volunteer Fire Department earned their Christmas hams that evening in as deft a display of the Fine Art of Power Extrication as any department, paid or volunteer, could hope for. A couple of hours after the Jaws of Life were cleaned and stored, Dorothy Elise Williams was born.

I scraped my boot heels on the carpet as I walked around the end of the pew, being careful not to startle the little girl, although, truth be known, I had no idea if Dot had ever been startled in her life. Or if it was even possible to startle her. Then I sat quietly on the bench just within arms’ reach and pondered the sculpture.

Yeah. It was bloody awful.

I reached into my vest and pulled out a pack of chewing gum, unwrapped a stick and chewed for a bit before taking a second stick out of the pack and—careful not to look at Dot—casually laid it on the bench midway between us. A couple of breaths later, equally casually, and without taking her eyes off the plastic abomination on the wall, Dot reached out and took the stick, unwrapping it with ferocious concentration and putting it into her mouth one quarter piece at a time before meticulously folding the foil wrapper into little squares and laying it on the bench midway between us. After a couple of breaths, I carefully picked it up and stuck it in an inner pocket of my denim vest.

Dot is odd.

Probably not very long after I sat down, but considerably longer than I would have liked—I was sitting in a funeral home, after dark, and I had seen this movie—Dot slid a battered something or other that I think was probably once a stuffed giraffe along the pew toward me, while maintaining a firm grip on one of its appendages with her left hand.

Careful not to touch the little girl, I grabbed a hold of a fuzzy limb and then carefully stood up. A beat later, Dot stood up herself, and then we started walking toward the exit.

Dot doesn’t like to be touched. As a matter of fact, the only sound I’ve ever heard the wee sprite make is an ear-splitting shriek whenever someone who isn’t family touches her. Learning that lesson left my ears ringing for days. However, as various and sundry gods are my witnesses, I swore that if this little girl turned and waved at the altar, I was picking her up and carrying her out the door at a dead sprint, probably emptying my magazine over my shoulder as we go, banshee wails and damage complaints notwithstanding.

Like I said, I’ve seen that movie.

Fortunately, anything Dot might have been communing with seemed to lack an appreciation for social graces or simply wished to spare my overactive imagination, and there was no waving.

From Rod Walker’s new bestselling novel, YOUNG MAN’S WAR:

Dad had come into the living room. He was a big man, and he looked like the sort of cop who would kick down doors and come in with his carbine blazing. He kept his head shaved, even though it kind of made him look like a Nazi, but I think the comparison pleased him. Right now, he had a massive scowl on his face, and I cringed a little. If that whining sound ticked him off and he thought it was coming from the game console…

“Yeah, Dad?” I said.

“Mute that,” he said. “I need to listen.”

I nodded and hit the mute button on the remote. The game’s chipper music went quiet, and I could hear that whining sound. It was now louder than the noise coming from the console’s fans.

“It must be the air conditioner,” pronounced Maggie. She tended to be a bit of a know-it-all. “That sounds like an air conditioner motor.”

“Maybe one of the neighbors is fixing something,” I said. “Or their car won’t start.”

“No, it must be the air conditioning,” said Maggie. “A broken car doesn’t make that noise.”

I looked up at Dad to see what he thought, and I blinked in surprise. There was something on his face that I had never seen before.

Dad looked…

He was frightened.

“Dad?” I said.

He didn’t say anything. I don’t think I can describe how shocking this was. Dad never showed fear about anything, ever. Chicago at that time wasn’t exactly a safe place, and people had tried to break into our house a couple of times. Dad had beaten the would-be burglars within an inch of their lives, his scowl never wavering. For him to show fear was as shocking as if the sun had gone dark in the middle of the day or had risen in the west.

“Dad?” said Maggie, concern in her voice.

“Oh, no,” he said in a quiet voice. “No, no, no. Not now. Not now.” He looked at Maggie and me. “I had really hoped you two would be spared this.”

“What’s wrong?” said Maggie.

Dad seemed to pull himself together, his face drawing into its usual hard mask. “Get your grab bags and go. We leave in five minutes.”

I pushed to my feet, puzzled, but I knew better than to disobey. “What’s going on?”

“And get your guns,” said Dad. I blinked at that. As you might guess, Dad was a gun nut, but he was equally fanatical about gun safety, and he had drilled into us that we were never to pick up a gun in a crisis unless we needed to use it, and never to point the weapon at anything unless we intended to kill it. “Guns, grab bags, kitchen in the five minutes. Go!”

He all but shouted the last word, which kicked us into motion. Dad didn’t shout. We scrambled up the stairs, and Maggie vanished into her bedroom, and I went into mine. My grab bag was the closet. Dad was ever careful, and the grab bag had been loaded with clothes, food, tools, weapons, supplies—everything you needed to survive in a disaster or a crisis. Part of our chores included packing and repacking the grab bags, making sure that everything worked and that nothing had expired.

I pried up one of the floorboards in my room and took my gun from its hiding place.

I say “my” gun, but it was technically Dad’s, and I was forbidden from touching it save at his express word or during a life-threatening emergency. It was a Glock 17 pistol, and while I would never win any shooting competitions, I was a decent shot with the thing. I checked that it was unloaded, and then pulled out the clips from the hiding place and tucked them into my grab bag.

Handling the heavy handgun seemed to send a shock through my brain. Before, the pure habit of obedience had taken over, but now I was beginning to wonder. Why were we doing this? All we had heard was an odd whining noise. Maybe it really was just the air conditioner acting up. The central air unit for our house was older than I was.

Then again, I had never seen Dad that freaked out by something. Angry, yes. He got angry and cold a lot. But frightened?

I shrugged, checked the grab bag one last time, and headed for the stairs. Maybe Dad was freaking out over nothing. If so, it was no big deal. Better to go along with what he had in mind that risk a punishment.

Maggie had beaten me downstairs, but she was always better organized than I was. Her eyes were wide in her face, though she seemed otherwise calm. I guess Dad’s alarm must have gotten to her. The whining noise had gotten louder, so loud that it was starting to get annoying.

“I guess,” said Maggie,” that’s not really the air conditioner.”

“No,” I said. I started to point out that I had told her so, but I stopped. The noise had gotten louder, and it also sounded…strange. I had thought it sounded like a broken machine, but now it didn’t sound like anything I had ever heard before, and it made the hair stand up on the back of my neck.

“It sounds like something screaming,” said Maggie.

“Yeah,” I said.

Then I saw the light.

It was nine o’clock at night, and the lights were off in the kitchen, the kitchen door closed. But around the edges of the door I saw a flickering, colorless light, almost like the fluorescent lights in a hospital emergency room. The light kept flickering, and I realized that it was flickering in time to the undulations of the whining noise.

“Roland,” said Maggie. “I think that’s coming from the alley.”

I started to answer, and Dad came hurrying down the stairs. He was dressed in something that looked like riot gear—body armor and cargo pants and a harness for weapons. He was carrying a lot of weapons, two pistols, several grenades, a pair of heavy tactical knives, and he was holding an AR-15 with a lot of custom modifications.

“Dad,” said Maggie. “If you go outside like that, you’re going to get arrested.”

“I’m not,” said Dad. “The force is about to have bigger problems. In a couple of hours there might not even be a police force. Are you both ready?”

When the Dark Gates open and unleash the monstrous Darksiders on an unsuspecting Earth, only the toughest and most determined people will survive. Roland and Maggie Kane are more fortunate than most, because their father, Daniel, is a Chicago cop who has taught them how to shoot and prepared them for almost every eventuality. But, as the Kane family soon learns, there is just no way to prepare for an alien invasion.


However, Roland also discovers that although the Darksiders’ blood may be green, the invaders will die as readily as any man after being ventilated with enough high-speed projectiles.


Rod Walker is the New New Heinlein, and The Thousand Worlds marks the return of science fiction to its classical form and historical heights. Written in the style and tradition of Robert Heinlein’s 12 classic juvenile novels published by Scribner, YOUNG MAN’S WAR is an exciting tale of survival, courage, independence, and the indomitable spirit of Man.

If you enjoyed MUTINY IN SPACE and ALIEN GAME, you will definitely like YOUNG MAN’S WAR. In my opinion, it is easily the best of the three books. It is not necessary to read them in any particular order,  as The Thousand Worlds setting links all the stories together, but only in the sense that all of them take place in the same science fiction universe. This is the kind of science fiction that SJWs destroyed beginning in the mid-80s. This is the kind of science fiction that people have been lamenting their inability to find for decades. And this is the kind of science fiction that Castalia House was created to publish.

But don’t take my word for it. From the reviews:

• Reading ‘Young Man’s War’ put me in mind of Larry Correia’s ‘Monster Hunters’ books, especially the first one. And I mean that in the very best of ways.
• Young Man’s War grabs your interest from the start and moves right along without meandering or relying on cliches. I enjoyed the pace and the ending was surprisingly uplifting.
• Rod Walker has clearly given some thought about how a civilized society would break down and then rebuild after the government evaporates. He captures the feel of Heinlein’s juvenile novels in the voice of the narrator and his focus on succeeding in his missions being worthy goals.
• This is a coming-of-age story where a teenager becomes a man in about the roughest situation you can think of. The blurb said Young Man’s War is an exciting tale of survival, courage, independence, and the indomitable spirit of Man.” The book delivers.
• If you like stories where the humans are overrun by strange, terrifying, evil aliens and the survivors immediately decide to *kick their slimy alien butts off our planet*, with tons of gunplay and excitement and a plot that keeps you up till 2am promising yourself “just one more page!”, then GET THIS BOOK NOW.

To know how to live, do we need God and religion, or does religion only produce wars, hatred, intolerance, and unhappiness? Does giving up God mean giving up morality, or can we finally live a peaceful and fulfilling life as atheists by following science and reason instead


Anthropologist Christopher Hallpike has spent a lifetime’s research on the morality and religion of different cultures around the world and shows that trying to base a moral life on atheism and science actually has some very nasty surprises in store for us.

Narrated by Jon Mollison. 7 hours and 27 minutes.

From the reviews:

• This book is a tremendous overview and discussion of one of the most important philosophical questions there are. It covers not only philosophy, but history, religion, anthropology, and biology in a broad-ranging discussion of the various aspects of the question. I learned a lot by reading it.
• Hallpike delivers here an intellectually rigorous work that shows how common atheist strains of thought such as the meaninglessness of the universe and the denial of free will do not justify any of western atheists’ professed liberal beliefs, even when such beliefs are otherwise worthy.
• A remarkably fresh take on an old question. Hallpike brings his years of experience as an anthropologist to the bigger questions of what religion is, and how only some kind of religious-based metaphysic can really one to speak meaningfully of “good”, “evil”, and “morality”.
• A valuable, learned and intelligent contribution to the debate about God, coming to the matter from an unusual but productive base discipline. 
• Probably the best refutation of evolutionary psychology and sociobiological claims about “human nature”. A must read.

The hilarious #1 Humor bestseller is now in paperback!

From the reviews:

• Truly side-splitting! Both touching and hilarious, a glimpse into a world seldom seen by those not in law enforcement.
• If you want to laugh so hard you fall out of your recliner and blind yourself with tears of laughter, this is the collection of tales for you. Sorta the opposite of pc. If you have worked in or around law enforcement, this might remind you of personal experiences, just written down with great verve and descriptions.
• Hilarious — as always! The LawDog has been one of my favorite bloggers for years. His voice is distinctive and perpetually entertaining. Run, do not walk, to plunk your money down for this collection; I promise you’ll be laughing your head off.
• Larry Correia led me to this gem. If you are at all a fan of short stories, told in a self-deprecating humourous way, get this now, and make everyone else wonder what you are laughing at. “Work for it fat man!”
• Great stories written in a fun and thoughtful manner. Entertaining insight into the people and culture of the small communities which make up the backbone of America.

BUT WAIT, THERE IS MORE!

LawDog had the honor of representing law and order in the Texas town of Bugscuffle as a Sheriff’s Deputy, where he became notorious for, among other things, the famous Case of the Pink Gorilla Suit. But long before he put on the deputy’s star, he grew up in Nigeria, where his experiences were equally unforgettable, and in most cases, every bit as funny. In THE LAWDOG FILES: AFRICAN ADVENTURES, LawDog chronicles his encounters with everything from bush pilots, 15-foot pythons, pygmy mongooses, Brigadier-Captain
Azikiwe, and Peace Corp hippies to the Nigerian space program.


THE LAWDOG FILES: AFRICAN ADVENTURES are every bit as funny as the previous volume, as LawDog relates his unforgettable experiences in a laconic, self-deprecating manner that is funny in its own right. Africa wins again, and again, and again, but, so too does the reader in this sobering, but hilarious collection of true tales from the Dark Continent.


Now available for preorder.