“In any case for today, we’re going to forget about the everyday normal world of 6 a.m. alarms or agonizing what’s for dinner. Today we’re going to a place somewhere in time and not so far away. We’re headed to the small Northeastern town of Jim Thorpe, Pennsylvania, often referred to as the Gateway to the Poconos. A word of caution when you enter, there is no turning back. Some of my readers might say, ‘Hey man, you can’t write a book like this.’

“Sorry. I just did.”

These are the words of JL Davis taken from the introduction of his brand- new novel titled, “The Rising.”

Intensity and intrigue

In this story, Davis, who has written five previous novels that include the “7th Day Jackal” trilogy, first invites us into small urban town in Germany where 10 children are taken from their homes in the middle of the night by military forces. A local musician named Travis Pratt finds himself caught in a web of corruption. He runs for his life and unearths the world’s most catastrophic secret.

You can bet that somehow and someway, this drama will find itself to Jim Thorpe and it does.

Davis knows every nook and cranny to utilize in his settings and scenes. His novels bring havoc and hell raising to the streets of Jim Thorpe that welcome thousands of visitors every year.

Davis offers inferential commentary about the current state of America through his characterization and themes in his previous books and “The Rising” is no exception.

“I’ve satirically dismantled the bureaucratic system in America, had the world’s oil supply run dry, made a group of children face off against a government experiment turned monster,” he said. “I’ve pitted a rookie CIA operative against a clairvoyant killer named Jonas Blackheart. Now I felt it was time to put the world on edge again, this time on a small and local northeastern town.”

Pages of mirrors

When readers delve into his stories, they find characters who just might remind them of themselves; in fact, they might people who Davis mirrors in his fictional thrillers. “While the characters change, people often ask me if I’ll mention their names in my novels. In ‘The Rising,’ you never know if you might find yourself as a mailman, a record store owner, or even a press secretary or the president.”

Like most writers, Davis gets the ideas for his books from personal experiences.

Cat scratch fever

Davis likes to write while sitting in his beat up, cat scratched recliner where he can imagine a storyline based upon a man drinking a cup of coffee in a diner that leads to a world crisis. Yet, at the very beginning, his page is “dry and lifeless” when something clicks inside his mind and like “a train picking up speed, it moves faster and faster” until his story takes off and “the characters begin to take on their own lives, make their own decisions and you just go along for the ride.”

In “The Rising,” Davis hopes his readers are entertained and removed from their “6 a.m. alarms.” This story is essentially a question of survival that wrestles with a moral conscience, which on different levels, face everyone in their daily decision making.

No exit

One of those decisions when he writes is to leave the television on. “I suppose I might need a diversion; otherwise, I might get lost in that fictional world and never come out,” he said with a laugh.

The setting of Jim Thorpe was the inspiration for “The Rising.” He explained that before it was a tourist site, Jim Thorpe was a sleepy, coal region town “with lots of room to dream” and those dreams sometimes become nightmares in his storytelling.

When asked to describe “The Rising” JL Davis reiterated, “Welcome to Jim Thorpe. Once you enter, there’s no turning back.”

“The Rising” can be purchased online at Amazon Books.