To celebrate Milele Safari’s stint as one of Rave Reviews Book Club Books of the Month for November 2015, I’m starting a new author feature for all writer-reviewers who’ve been kind enough to read my first novel from it’s publication at the end of 2013 to date. So a huge welcome to Ted Farrar my first 5 star reviewer and a very talented author in his own right.

The official lowdown on Ted

Ted Farrar was born in Leeds, England but emigrated to South Africa at the age of 10. He caught the travel bug early: at the age of 19 he hitch-hiked to Afghanistan. Since then he has travelled widely in Africa, Europe and Asia. His work experience is varied: at one time or another he’s been a barman, a carer, a switchboard operator, usher, warehouseman, clerk or instrument technician. He’s slept in cabbage fields, doorways, police stations, drainage tunnels and park benches, and even on the slopes of Mount Ararat. He’s been shot at, lost in the bush, chased by hippos, bitten by snakes, mugged, blown up and arrested and has suffered tropical diseases, serious falls and car accidents. His writing is largely influenced by his half-Irish father and his own paranormal experiences.

& Ted’s take on Ted!

My primary love is nature – I remain astonished beyond belief at its beauty and wonder, my second love is writing, because how can you keep all that wonder to yourself without exploding? I deplore the human race for its destructiveness and lack of respect for our planet, but I’m fascinated by people, and why we sometimes do what we do. I believe my biological training provides me with some enlightenment in this respect. My other interests range from politics to the paranormal, travel to theology, healthcare to history and palaeogeography to photography.

ABOUT TED’S BOOK ~ Dreamers (description from the Amazon page)

She was completely unresisting as the huge, calloused hand clamped over her mouth and pulled her head back. The last thing she saw was the devil himself standing over her before the blade slashed a long, smooth arc across her throat with such force it grated across her cervical vertebrae, and everything faded to black.
Wilson Cole is having enough difficulty distinguishing between what’s real and what’s imagined, but he’s inclined to believe the experts when they tell him his Dreamworld is just a figment of his imagination. But his nightmares reach a whole new level after a run-in with the ‘imagined’ Greenspite and the subsequent murder of his closest friend.
To a veteran cop like Alex Gumbold there’s nothing new under the sun, until he meets Wilson Cole and everything he believes is turned on its head. Cole is the common denominator and prime suspect in the Sleep Institute murders, but as the body count rises he discovers how little his 37 years as a policeman have prepared him for the ensuing revelations, as he’s torn between enforcing the law and discovering the truth.

My 5* Review of Dreamers

 

Perhaps the moral for this if you’re adept at dreaming in technicolor is never to eat cheese before bedtime. I loved this inventive, jazzy, street-smart fantasy horror so much I stayed up until the not so wee small hours to finish devouring it – and my tablet died at the beginning of the culminating chapter, though thankfully after the definitive climax where the not so helpless heroine is put beyond the malevolent clutches of the main antagonist.
Dreamers takes place mostly in the 1980’s where ciggies are still smoked everywhere and there’s no alternative to landlines. The setting in and around Leeds has the ring of truth and a gritty authenticity to underlay the frankly stunning and original fantasy elements, where dreams are most certainly real and, if you die in your sleep, your mind is condemned to gurgling animalistic zombiedom, always supposing that your body had not already been murdered by one of your fellow Dreamers… The four central characters, Cole, Anemos, Bright and Greenspite, two living, one murdered and the other very much at death’s door, leads DI Gumbold of the Leeds police force, already mired in trying to find the real-life Yorkshire Ripper, into a grisly, but frequently comedic danse macabre as twenty leading sleep clinic subjects and their researchers are systematically hunted down by a serial killer with gut-curdling supernatural powers and a viciously audacious masterplan to devastate the nightmarish Land of Sheol – and ultimately to invade heaven itself.
If you appreciate dark fantasy, black comedy and pushing your imagination to roller-coaster heights and troughs then please, please do yourself a real favour and read this rarity – a truly original and funky Tale of the Unexpected, with buckets of blood but not a vampire in sight! There are slayers and plenty of literal and metaphoric demons though. And goblins – or are they? Read it NOW!

Find out much more about Ted and his work on

the website
https://about.me/tedfarrar

Goodreads Author page

Twitter
@variableenergy

email
afrixalus@sky.com