Bøger af Ralph Bland

Maleva is a fictional sequel to the Universal film, "House of Dracula."(1945) It features many of the same characters from both that film and the earlier film, "The Wolf Man (1944).The book's premise is that Gwen Conliffe, the former lover of Larry Talbot, returns to Llanwelly in Wales two years after Talbot's death and later supposed "cure" and enlists the aid of the gypsy woman Maleva to help her find Talbot, for it is rumored he is not dead but has been resurrected from his tragic end and still walks the earth as a werewolf. The search begins in Wales and crosses the Irish Sea to Ireland, as Maleva and Gwen, with the aid of Gwen's former romantic interest and a band of Irish Travellers journey across Ireland to several locales to find Larry Talbot and help him find his predestined end. Told in alternate third-person and first-person stream of consciousness, Maleva is the story of Gwen Conliffe's and Maleva's quest to bring peace to the torturous existence of Larry Talbot

It is Ralph Bland's love for his hometown of Nashville, Tennessee, that connects the stories in NOT DEAD AGAIN. Whether the setting is occupied by an adolescent girl pondering the effects her parents' divorce will have on her life or a fifty-five year-old man realizing that death comes to everyone, the scene is always surrounded by Nashville with its gleanings of the past, present, and a foreboding sense of what the future might bring. These are Southern people whose lives collide with love and death, remembrances both bittersweet and harrowing, and the everyday moments of existence that suddenly gallop off into the world of the past, where events were something else, something else indeed. The stories in this book--some funny, some sad, some filled with the ridiculousness that is life itself--suggest there is a tale to be told by everyone, no matter their particular place on the planet.

Exeunt is a story about the bonds and limits of friendship among five middle aged friends in the waning days of 1988. Set in the fictional town of Abington, Tennessee, the novel concerns the final week of business for Overton's Market, an old grocery store where all five of the men once worked together during high school and college and where two still remain as mainstay employees. During post-Christmas week, when all the men are present in Abington for the holidays, the last week of business for the old store looms as a newer building across the lot prepares to open - a larger, more modern, and totally antiseptic structure that belies the romance and antique charm of Overton's. The five men embark on a joint quest to close the old store in style, spending time together recollecting their past lives as a group, and learning how to deal with approaching their forties and leaving behind the world of their youth. The road is rocky and the lessons to be learned are not always pretty, but something in the town's air and their delicate balance between the past and the future forces each man in this group of Peter Pan dreamers to try and move forward in their lives, if only with a sigh and a parting glance back at what was once exclusively theirs.Ralph Bland is the author of Stars Rain Sun Moon, Ace, seven other novels, and two collections of short stories. A native Nashvillian, he lives with his wife and spoiled dogs on the outskirts of Music City, USA, disguised sometimes as a normal person.

A Baker's dozen's worth of short stories and a novella from the author of ACE and STARS RAIN SUN MOON.

Ralph Bland's debut novel tells the story of Amy Martin and how her life and death affects five of her contemporaries. Told in first person narrative from multiple characters, the novel unfolds a rambling tale of how the recently deceased Amy is nowhere close to being dead and gone in the hearts and minds of the people left behind in her wake. Spanning her just-completed life, this novel is a slapstick tragedy and a bittersweet hike into the past, present, and future psyches of a group of people still struggling to get their acts together.

Ralph Bland's thirteenth novel, Fast Car, is the story of the friendship shared between an older man in his fifties and a young man closing fast on his thirties in current day Nashville, Tennessee. The two meet while working as automobile mechanics for an elite foreign car repair shop that caters mostly to the wealthy; the younger, Leonard Wright, is the nephew of the owner and a recent rehabilitation graduate from a bout with drugs and theft of company funds from his previous place of employment, and the elder, Sam Thornton, is an ex-con from peddling drugs back in his college days and the owner of a battered 1965 Sunbeam Tiger that has seen better days but is his lifetime pride and joy, having inherited it as a young boy after his father's death. Leonard takes a job with his uncle as a means of finding himself a better standing and an escape from his failed former existence, while Sam arrives under mysterious circumstances to work at John Wright's business as an elite mechanic with a special know-how of repairing expensive foreign cars.Fast Car is the story of two men and a car that once was a classic, and how sometimes portions and sections of hopes and wishes have to be sorted through and decided upon to discover which to keep and which to let go. It is a coming-of-age story and a study of class differences, romance, and the inevitable abandonment of dreams.Ralph Bland is the author of thirteen novels and three collections of short stories and novellas. He is a graduate of Belmont University in Nashville, Tennessee, and lives with his wife, dogs, his Frank Sinatra music collection, and an eccentric MG on the outskirts of Music City, USA.

"Ralph Bland's talent for words will draw the reader into the passenger seat for a ride-along through the roads of Tennessee, down boulevards of wistful dreams, crazed streets of mischance, and along precipices of bad judgment. And the road home will leave you thinking about every single thing you see or experience in a new way, like a landscape scrubbed clean right after a rainstorm. Super Sport takes you to the heart of its characters and lets you listen in on what life brings to them, with all their regrets and all their hopes, and you will miss those characters when you turn the last page of the book." --Sand Pilarski, Pike Press Editor

Lamb White Days is a magical realism trilogy in the Thomas Wolfe tradition about a young man's adventures and character development from three stages of his life. Beginning in 1962 and ending in 1970, the novel concerns the coming of age of Robinson Bell, a Southern boy the reader first meets at the age of twelve. From this opening part of the trilogy, Robinson progresses to age fifteen and eventually to his senior year of high school, chronicling his break from his family and familiar surroundings and his transition into a college freshman away from home for the first time. Between his growing sense of isolation, his ongoing discovery of the wicked ways of the world and its sometimes unexpected kindnesses, and his unceasing search for his own unique place upon the mystical earth of his existence, Robinson Bell discovers himself growing up to become the fellow he never thought he'd be.This first book in Bland's trilogy is sure to leave the reader with a keen sense of that magical age that was the 1960's through the eyes of his wonderfully raftered protagonist, Robinson Bell.