So, I thought I’d look through the great reviews that readers have posted to Amazon and/or Goodreads and post some items with my sincere thanks for reading and for taking the time to review (and rate).

The first of the twelve stories in A Twilight Reel–the January story–is “The Wine of Astonishment.” Here’s Pisgah Press’s one-sentence description of the course: “In the opening tale, a local preacher is taken captive by a fallen predecessor and struggles to escape before his own sins bring him down as well.”

Here are two comments specifically focused on “Wine”:

• With “The Wine of Astonishment,” this anthology kicks off with an Edgar Allan Poe flavored story of temptation and desperation involving the preacher of a community church, a mystery woman, and a madman. The ending does not disappoint.

• Cody also has this surprisingly great sense of horror and tension. I didn’t expect to read things that gave me a deep sense of unease and the occasional hair-rise on the arms, but I think Cody gives us a really good sense of the fear that comes from both emotional and physical bits of ourselves. I’d say the most notable stories with this kind of tension is the latter half of cold sweat in “The Wine of Astonishment.” . . .

The title of the story comes from Psalm 60, the third verse of which reads, “Thou hast shewed thy people hard things: thou hast made us to drink the wine of astonishment” (KJV). I’m not sure at what point this phrase grabbed me, but grab me it did. It seems to work perfectly for the story.

As for the story, longtime friend Tom DuVall experienced a captivity event like this one night when we were in high school and he was coming from Marshall to Walnut to spend the night at my house. Having known Tom for years now, I sometimes wonder if what he said happened really happened. I think it did, but it really doesn’t matter. The story came regardless.

If asked about an influence for the story, I’d have to say I owe the journey into the nighttime wilderness and the encounter with this creepy character to a favorite writer, Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804-1864), and his classic short story from the 1830s, “Young Goodman Brown.”