Bøker av 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

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.

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.