Tearing Down The Statues

"In almost cinematic scope, Brian portrays a vast world, populated by an amazing assortment of people, beasts, and war machines that is subject to the ancient laws of the Salt Mystic. With exploits and emotions that combine the technology of Star Wars and the quest of The Hobbit, Tearing Down The Statues keeps you turning the pages and holding your breath while you experience this strange world as if you are in the middle of the intrigue. This is a tremendous story that needs to be read slowly for one to fully grasp the complexities that drive the characters and fully appreciate the vast wonders being exposed." -Readers' Favorite

A thousand-year mountain city is on fire.

It was beautiful once. You should have seen it - slate gabled apartments with rooftops going on forever, copper-domed observatories, sprawling temples, and tall glass skyrise towers. They rode vortex cars right up the sides of buildings on vertical streets. In the center, inside what's now a misty crater guarded by smiling lunatics, once stood a shining computronium tower they called Balcister. That's where it started - at least the part we can see now. What happened here is a shadowed reflection of where you live. Of you.

The Salt Mystic warned about this kind of thing thousands of years ago, so she hid tripwires in their stories and in their histories...guardians. Sometimes they wake up to make things right. Soon, wily generals and scheming counselors will clash their fleets in battles of shrieking steel-entrained tornadoes, cannonballs of lightning, and tanks the size of cities. They'll fall and burn by the millions, following the old echoes of the fascinating and cursed Talgo family. It will be a seductive idea, to see a guardian in this generation when the nations are ripping each other apart.

Sometimes, it's too seductive an idea and you might believe it's you. And some terrible times, people who have no business at all meddling with such things, try to engineer them.

You won't believe what happens now.

Written with cunningly inventive ideas and cinematic, visionary storytelling, Tearing Down The Statues invites you into a richly imagined world with a deep and catastrophic history reflected painfully in every decision, every conflict. First in the exciting Salt Mystic series!

"As in Pearl Harbor or September 11th, the very best of a nation's character shows up when it's hit the hardest. Tearing Down The Statues poses the question of what would happen in a crisis should a nation lose its character first. As a naval officer, businessman, and consultant, author Brian Bennudriti has traveled extensively and seen personally a sea-change transformation in America over the last fifteen years. Now in his new novel he tells an epic adventure story in a fantasy world reflecting our own, but peoples it with lost characters longing for spiritual connections in the chaos after a tragedy reminiscent of September 11th." -Kansas City InfoZine