Holy Terror by John R. Dougherty Book Tour, Guest Post & Giveaway! {Ends 11/25/22}

Review By LAWonder10:

This is a very captivating story. It is nothing like I expected it to be. It is a little gory at times but very gripping. It involves various types of supernatural characters. It is part detective mystery and part otherworldly confrontations. It is a “page-turner” and keeps one guessing about the outcome. 

This is a book of determination, judgment, defiance, self-examination, and retribution. It is very thought-provoking.

The characters are well-defined and events are portrayed vividly. The Title and Cover image are both chosen very well in depicting the contents of the book.

My personal opinion, in a large part, believes as the author portrays but not totally. However, it is a view worth examining. It is very imaginative.

I offer a Four and a Half Stars rating.

This book was gifted me with no pressure to post a positive review. This is my honest review.

 HOW I STARTED WRITING

As a teenager, I aspired to becoming the pastor of a church someday. I took copious notes of sermons I listened to at church (okay, yes, you could say I was a bit of an odd teenager ��), and by age 14-15 I was already writing my own future sermons that I was sure I would eventually be preaching. In fact, some of those very sermons I outlined as a teenager in my handy-dandy spiral notebook actually did become the basis for a few of the sermons I would eventually present from the pulpit throughout my 20s, 30s, and 40s. By the time I was 16-17, I was writing Bible book commentaries – somewhere hidden away in an old filing cabinet, I think I still have the few that I worked on.

When I was 20-year-old college sophomore, I preached my first pulpit sermon and unexpectedly even got paid for doing so – that was a pretty exciting prospect to a poor college student! That would set the stage for the next nearly 30 years of my life, as I would end up preaching close to a thousand sermons across over 30 different Churches of Christ, mostly small, rural congregations throughout Missouri. I never did this as a “full time gig”, but rather it was always an evenings and weekends job, while I maintained my professional information technology (IT) career as my day job. During that time, I wrote a large assortment of short articles for church bulletins, and frequently was graced with appreciation from church members of how much they enjoyed my writing. “You’re a good writer,” I actually did hear from people periodically.

However, it wasn’t until 1996 that I was originally inspired to tackle writing a novel (whoa, seriously, 1996 – that long ago – was the initial birth of the story of Thumos???). I worked on that in short spurts over a dozen years, never getting serious about it because too many other life activities consumed my time (you know, little things like marriage and raising 3 kids, working full-time, and those almost-every-weekend circuit-riding preaching outings!). Novel writing went dormant in the late 2000s and early 2010s, although I did attend a few how-to writing seminars, how to get published, reading a few articles on how to do it, thinking of new ideas to add to my novel, etc. Everything and everyone told me “writing is too hard, getting published is nigh to impossible, hardly anyone gets to do that, it’s a pipe dream” – and I listened to all that…for a while.

Then in the mid 2010’s, I got the bug again, and I really wanted to try to finish my first novel, Holy Terror. Maybe turning 50 was a trigger. Maybe my conversion to becoming a Catholic Christian was a trigger. Maybe that trigger will always be a mystery (but I do think God was nudging me all along on this long, drawn-out journey). In any case, by 2018, I actually completed it (well, hold on, I only thought it was complete ��). That’s when my nephew, Wes, who himself had recently been through the experience of writing and publishing a book (Eternal Effect Mortals by Wesley Salmons, 2015) told me “there’s a lady in Jacksonville, FL who helped me tremendously, and I sure wish I would have found her from the beginning of my book project – she is the reason I was able to finish it”. So, I contacted Melody Bussey (https://www.melodybussey.com/), we hit it off, and got started working with her in January 2019, quickly discovering my “finished” novel was not so finished, and I had a lot to learn about writing novels (that’s a whole other story, for another time). Then, as they say, “the rest is history”. Now it’s 2022, and Holy Terror is honest-to-God truly finished (although is a novel really ever finished???) and is finally going into print. Who’d a thunk it???