Friday, November 22, 2013

Whisperers Now OFFICIALLY on Sale in the UK

It’s publication day, hurrah, hurrah and the Duckworth edition of Whisperers: The Secret History of the Spirit World should be available throughout the length and breadth of the British Isles.  I urge you to rush out and buy a copy in aid of the Help Make Herbie Rich and Famous project.

Oh, and reader reviews on the internet would be helpful too.

Saturday, November 09, 2013

Whisperers Now On Sale in U.K.

Early copies of my non-fiction study of spirit influence on human history, Whisperers: the Secret History of the Spirit World are now on sale on Amazon UK.  Although the U.K.’s Duckworth edition isn’t scheduled for publication until November 21, Amazon U.K. has it listed as in stock now at more than a pound cheaper than the U.S. edition which is also listed.

Friday, September 27, 2013

Gamebook News

I see the boys at Megara Entertainment in Seattle are predicting a gamebook resurgence. To celebrate, they’re planning a collector’s edition of The Way of the Tiger, a welcome revival of Mark Smith and Jamie Thomson’s hugely popular 1980s gamebook series. Interestingly, the project is being funded through Kickstarter (http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1615043334/the-way-of-the-tiger-gamebooks-new-collectors-edit ) with a heap of pledges already in place, which suggests Megara are right about the growing number of game book fans out there, You can get the whole story in their Press release at  http://richardhetley.files.wordpress.com/2013/09/tiger-gamebook-press-release.pdf

Meanwhile the launch of my own electronic game book projects (Demonspawn and GrailQuest) with Tin Man in Australia have been delayed until next year to allow their technical team time to develop a new and more sophisticated games engine. It’ll be worth the wait.

Thursday, August 01, 2013

Whisperers Ebook on Way

For some reason, people have been asking me if an ebook version of Whisperers: The Secret History of the Spirit World was on the cards and in my usual vague way, I didn’t really have a clue. But I do now, thanks to the sterling investigative work of my literary agent, Ms. Sophie Hicks of Ed Victor Ltd. In the U.S. there’s an ebook in production at the moment, scheduled for issue next month (September) with an  ebook of the U.K. version to be published in November to coincide with the British hardback.

Meanwhile, sales of and comments on the U.S. hardback, published in June, continue to be lively.

Thursday, July 11, 2013

Free Read

There’s a piece of mine you can read for free at http://www.smartpopbooks.com/the-war-of-light-and-darkness/ until next Tuesday. It’s up there promoting an anthology on C. S. Lewis I had the honour of editing a little while ago. If you’re interested in an esoteric viewpoint on the Second World War, grab the opportunity to read it now. After Tuesday you’ll only get an extract.

Thursday, June 13, 2013

Whisperers: the Secret History of the Spirit World is on sale NOW

The title of this post says it all. It’s available on-line in US and UK, available in good US bookshops. Rush out and buy your copy instantly.

Wednesday, June 12, 2013

Kirkus on Whisperers

Kirkus Reviews, the premier book evaluation site, has concluded that my ‘deftly corralled, intriguing research (for Whisperers: The Secret History of the Spirit World) translates into unsettling, if academically written, “proof” of the existence of spiritual suggestion.’ 

The review concludes, ‘Certain hokum for skeptics, but the more open-minded will savor this chillingly convincing testimonial.’ 

You can read the full review at...

https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/jh-brennan/whisperers/

Shameless Plug

Whisperers: The Secret History of the Spirit World is published in the States tomorrow, but you can rush to order your copy from Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk right now.

Monday, May 27, 2013

Whisperers Reviews

Publishers Weekly, who, I must say, are usually kind to me, broke their usual pattern with a pre-publication review of Whisperers: The Secret History of the Spirit World which they described as ‘dreary’ and ‘unremarkable.’ Lest you find this as off-putting as I do, you might like to balance the opinion against some other pre-publication reviews from a few of my fellow authors...


“Impeccable research, firm grasp of history, and clarity of writing reconfirm J.H. Brennan as the expert in the field of the paranormal.” -—Steve Peek, author of Coyote Dreaming

“J.H. Brennan is an expert storyteller who paints an often terrifying picture of how human destiny has regularly been changed forever by individuals convinced they were in communication with intelligences from beyond. In Whisperers, Brennan has created a unique and timely history of spirit voices that is both brilliant and utterly chilling.” -—Andrew Donkin, coauthor of The Terminal Man

"Highly readable…Here is the history that you didn’t learn about in the classroom…a challenging and thought-provoking book." --Christopher McIntosh, Fellow and Lecturer at the University of Exeter and author of The Rosicrucians

"From the hair-raising to the eyebrow-raising, this is a scintillating account of meetings with spirits through history. Whisperers takes us from an Egyptian guide to summoning Anubis, through a haunted house in ancient Athens, to the black books of the Middle Ages. It chronicles early anthropologists being hoodwinked by shamans, and gives an account of an area where so much has been written, Nazi occultism, that inspires confidence as well as horror. Hats off to J.H. Brennan!" --Jonathan Black, author of The Secret History of the World

Whisperers will be published in the United States on June 13 and in the U.K. in November. 

Friday, April 12, 2013

Whisperers On Sale Soon

I haven’t published any serious non-fiction for more than a decade, but that’s about to change on June 13 when Overlook Hardbacks in New York bring out Whisperers: The Secret History of the Spirit World in the U.S. with a U.K. edition due from Duckworth in London in November. It’s a book I’ve been writing on and off for forty years, presenting what I genuinely believe to be a wholly new and different view of human history.

The seed was sown in the early 1970s while I was researching a book on occult practice in Nazi Germany. One of the things I discovered then was that Heinrich Himmler held seances in the crypt of Quedlinburg Cathedral to seek the advice of the Medieval king Heinrich the Fowler on political matters.

This struck me as chilling. Himmler was head of the SS and Gestapo and the man ultimately in charge of the so-called ‘Final Solution of the Jewish Problem’ a programme of industrialised murder that cost 6 million lives. Could the Reichfuhrer really have based his life and death decisions on the whisperings of  a spirit?

He could and he did and he wasn’t the only one. Over the years I gradually unearthed more and more evidence that throughout the course of human history, politicians and popes, messiahs and kings, world leaders of every political and religious persuasion have been guided by voices from the Beyond. Which means that your life and mine have been indirectly influenced by entities we know nothing about and may not even believe in.

Once you reach that conclusion, an obvious question presents itself. What exactly are the Whisperers? There are many answers. Psychologists usually insist they are nothing more than unconscious contents — fantasies and wish-fulfilments — erupting into consciousness as pseudo-personalities. Spiritualists claim they are spirits of the dead. The religiously-minded see them as God, gods, angels or other sacred entities. None of these notions is particularly satisfactory, so I set out to investigate the question for myself.

The result was an intellectual journey with a completely unexpected ending.

It’s all in the book, folks. You can pre-order your copy from Amazon or Barnes & Noble.

Sunday, January 06, 2013

Result

Well, (modest smile) it seems Ruler of the Realm won its cover war by 75% of votes to 25%.