“I don’t wanna’ get killed, but I’m intrigued. Count me in”

Albert Taylor is a man on a mission – he is a UC Berkeley professor by day and at night, he is a paranormal investigator. He battles demons, fends off Bigfoots and stops the lunatics from taking over the asylum. In short, Professor Albert Taylor is a thinking man’s action hero.

Imagine if Fox Mulder had been sacked from the F.B.I. (let’s face it, Mulder probably should have been sacked early on in season one) and been given a job with Lone Gunman becoming Editor-in-Chief of their newspaper, this is the type of book that would have been written about him. In The Occult Files of Albert Taylor, Derek Muk has borrowed all the good stuff from the classic Sci-Fi shows and produced a veritable melee of stonking little paranormal stories that will delight and intrigue any Sci-Fi fan.

If I have two minor criticisms of his book, one is that it is obvious that the stories were written as standalone stories (since he wrote the description of his hero verbatim almost eleven times), which can get a bit irritating and stops the reader from throwing themselves into the story completely. The other is that he has no Scully, and when you are writing stories like this, you need a Scully. You need that person, that monkey on your back, saying “it couldn’t be Vampires” because when you convince them that it is Vampires, then you have convinced your most cynical of readers.

These criticisms aside, Muk’s book is filled with interesting and diverse characters, and the places where the book is set are brought thrillingly and realistically to life because of the author’s attention to detail. Another huge thumbs-up to the author’s style of writing is the fact that no story ends as you would expect. Each has a delicious little twist, which will inevitably lead you to wanting to Google ‘Albert Taylor’ and see if there are any more little paranormal gems floating about in cyberspace.

All in all, Albert Taylor is a Paranormal Investigator who will have a long and scary future, and I can’t wait to hear more from this detective.


« Back