WILMINGTON, NC, December 11, 2025 /24-7PressRelease/ -- Bestselling author Eric Madeen has announced his latest novel, 'Massage World', will be available at no charge in ebook form at no charge December 13 and 14 at https://www.amazon.com/stores/Eric-Madeen/author/B08VGRNJVW?, just in time for the Holiday season.

Books are the ideal Holiday present as they can offer both escape and enrichment, providing readers with a chance to explore new worlds, ideas, and perspectives. They can convey deep emotions, inspire creativity, and spark meaningful conversations - a gift tailored to individual tastes. The act of gifting a book shows care and consideration, allowing the giver to share a cherished story or a valuable lesson that can resonate with the recipient for years to come.

'Massage World' is a multicultural thriller that dives deep into both sides of the massage industry, and throughout you'll marvel at the unravelling of both sides. From the get-go you'll be struck with the force of that ambiguity, each side repelling each other like magnets thus making for a read with conflict galore, exceeding reader expectation and thus creating narrative drive ..., a kind of drive that's hell on massage tables' wheels throughout and at times laugh out loud hilarious.

As the global demand for massage therapy skyrockets, from luxurious spas to discreet outcalls, one ambitious therapist, Ingrid Swanson, dares to open Massage World, a grand health spa, defying the local underworld kingpin.

Enter Jack Cobb, a ruthless massage parlor lord determined to seize control of Ingrid's business through a series of illicit "massage wars," aided by a crooked undercover vice cop soliciting "extras." The chaos escalates as a media frenzy erupts following a dramatic police raid, sparking neighborhood protests and the crackle of soooo much more.

A fearless female biker gang figures in the ending, riding their rice rocket Yamahas and Hondas up the grandiose stairs of Massage World then roaring up another floor ... then the hellacious chase and ...

Your being smitten with this Dionysian nightmare, clashing as it does with those on both sides of the tracks, be they crystally (holistic) or oily in a read you'll find zesty and informative as in what goes down or doesn't in the sliding signifier of Massage World, draped ... or the heck with the drape.

'Massage World' has received rave reviews from readers:

"It combines gritty realism, lurid sensationalism, and darker-than-black comedy to conjure up a phantasmagoric vision of a world in pain … So earthquaking powerful and fresh it is, I've never read anything quite like it, not even close." — Larry McCaffery, author notably of Some Other Frequency: Interviews with Innovative American Authors and former Professor of English and Comparative Literature at SDSU.

"It's a sizzler of a thriller bursting with eccentric energy." — William Luvaas, winner of a Huffington Post Book of the Year award.

"Very cinematic with a canny and calculated construction. A really high-octane potboiler. Motion and emotion. Exotica and erotica from SoCal to Japan and back. Conflict galore. Kinkiness with and without aromatic oils. Who could ask for more?" — Harold Jaffe, Professor Emeritus of Creative Writing and Literature at San Diego State University and former Editor of Fiction International.

The ebook version of 'Massage World' will be available December 13 and 14 at no charge at Amazon at https://www.amazon.com/stores/Eric-Madeen/author/B08VGRNJVW?

Other books:

Eric Madeen's bestselling travelogue, 'Asian Trail Mix: True Tales from Borneo to Japan,' scales down the sprawl of Asia by focusing on the unique and revelatory in gemmy prose. See up close and personal the razzmatazz of novice monks at play in northern Laos, the bonding with hustling pedicab drivers in Ho Chi Minh City, the rainforests blazed on gutsy treks across Borneo and Thailand's Elephant Island and novel things Japanese. Served up nice and spicy, Asian Trail Mix is slathered across 12 rocking-it essays plus a tall tale at its glorious ending, making for a baker's dozen of sumptuousness.

In a review for 'Asian Trail Mix', one reader said, "The writing is lush and emotive. It contains images and turns of phrase that will stay with you." Another said, "'Mr. Madeen has a knack for taking one into the depths of a country and introducing the reader to fascinating customs and interesting characters. Five stars!"

Another stated, "The author focuses on subjects of local interest at each of the intervening destinations, or vignettes. An American based in Japan, he has a writer's eye for details and is quite adept at capturing the local sights, sounds, weather, atmosphere, and such of each place as well as conveying his personal impressions as an experienced traveler with a literary background and sensibility."

'Water Drumming In The Soul' - a fiery tale set in steamy equatorial Africa, Peace Corps volunteer David Fields is on mission: to build a medical dispensary in a village where spells are cast on enemies and fear of a geek-shaman reigns. David seldom has his bearings – cultural or geographical – and must fight a cocktail of tropical maladies as well as social taboos as he throws himself into work. Until... he meets Assam. Captivated by her water drumming, her playing the stream as a drum, David is drawn to her early on and becomes the hunter captured by the game. And what a rollicking game of love it is - with a tension or excitement between them that never dissipates, … until the haunting end.

'Tokyo-ing!' – is an apt neologism for this trio of tales chiming through the world's largest megalopolis. Only a multi-decade literary miner with the seal permanent resident wrapped on his pick axe could tunnel down the shaft leading to literary lucre, allowing readers to emerge enriched from the depths of Tokyo-ing! Put another way, Joseph Conrad's Lord Jim flees shame from Jim, as first mate, jumping ship packed with passengers left behind on a ship that doesn't sink, thus even a sideways glance of suspicion cast his way has him on a continuous run from shame that cannot be outrun. Like wildfire in that regard but in reverse. Since wildfire cannot be outrun, Madeen does what he has to do and he does it boldly and literarily, as in running directly into the flames and through them, as rendered upfront in his story "About Face." Range is further realized in "Sobering Love," told in the persona of first-person female, and finally "Fire Horse" gallops into the fiery galaxies of 2026, a Fire Horse year, one in 60 in the Chinese lunar calendar, when births plummeted so as to avoid having a Fire Horse girl. Curious. Fascinating. The author's wife is a Fire Horse.

'Tennis Clubbed, Snubbed and Rubbity-Dub Dubbed' - In historically rich Yokohama, where Captain Perry and his Black Ships cracked open Japan, the wicked shiver of the tennis snub in the postmodern present pits David Adams against K: a puffed-up xenophobic tyrant who rules over the courts of a club that has as its anthem, ironically, the promotion of international friendship.

Eric Madeen is available for media interviews and can be reached at [email protected]. All of his books are available at Amazon at https://www.amazon.com/stores/Eric-Madeen/author/B08VGRNJVW?. More information is available at his website at https://ericmadeen.com/.

About Eric Madeen:

Eric Madeen is a recently retired associate professor of modern literature at Tokyo City University and an adjunct professor at Keio University. He's an award-winning author of six books. His writing has been published widely -- in Time, Asia Week, The East, Daily Yomiuri, Tokyo Journal, Kyoto Journal, Metropolis, Mississippi Review, ANA's inflight magazine Wingspan, Peace Corps Worldwide, Japanophile, Yomimono, The Pretentious Idea, Tombstone Epitaph, several anthologies, academic journals, therein his seminal essay "Under Western and Eastern Eyes" jointly published by the Ministry of Education of the Western Federation, Russia, and the Joseph Conrad Foundation, USA, and so on.

Madeen has been featured in several radio interviews (9 in the USA and 1 in Japan) and various print media. He once made his living copywriting for what was then the world's largest ad agency Dentsu, for clients as diverse as Mazda, Subaru, Canon, Konica, Nikko Hotels International and Sony.

He was a Peace Corps volunteer in Francophone Gabon, Africa, where he built a primary school complex in an equatorial village surrounded by rainforest, a mind-blowing experience which inspired his first book.

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