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The Greatest Show in Town arrives on Monday

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GreatestShowInTownCover.inddI’m proud to announce that on Monday (just in time for Christmas) my short story collection The Greatest Show In Town and other shorts will be released on Kindle (with a Kobo edition following afterwards).

This collection serves up 11 nasty bits of Brit Grit for you to sample. They’re not gonna go down easy, but you don’t want that, right? You didn’t come here for sparkly vampires, boy wizards, and easy reading – you can get that elsewhere. No, you’re here for stories that grab your nuts and don’t let go. Tales that beat you down and do nasty things to you while you’re out cold. That’s what I’m giving you here – and you’ll take it and like it!

The Greatest Show In Town will eventually be £1.99 ($2.99) but until the new year comes around you can grab it for the bargain price of 99p ($0.99). You lucky things!

Tell your friends, your neighbours, your loved ones and total strangers about this momentous news. Because I’m skint and need to eat at some point this side of Christmas.

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Review: Inherent Vice by Thomas Pychon

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At the tail-end of the 60s, as the peace and love generation have given way to something darker, Doc Sportello, a private detective with a serious penchant for soft drugs, is hired by an ex-girlfriend to look into the affairs of her current lover, a Californian millionaire real estate mogul, who she thinks is in trouble. At the same time he’s hired by an ex-con to look into the affairs of his former cell mate, and also by a woman who wants Sportello to look into the mysterious heroin related death of her husband. As the various strands weave together, Sportello realises that there are quite a few conspiracies going involving the authorities and an organisation called the Golden Fang.

Over the years I’ve read a fair bit of Pynchon’s back-catalogue (barring Gravity’s Rainbow and Against The Day) and his stuff is nearly always about conspiracies, power struggles and abuses of power by those in charge. And Inherent Vice is no different in this respect. It has all the elements one should expect from Pynchon: crazy conspiracies, interweaving storylines, stupid character names, postmodern playfulness, made-up songs and lyrics, and some utterly ravishing prose, but it also has a tightness that has been missing from his work since Vineland (to which Inherent Vice seems like a prequel of sorts).

Whenever a well-known literary writer attempts hardboiled fiction the results can often seem like the worst sort of parody (ie. total shit), but Pynchon’s work straddles homage and originality beautifully. He knows his stuff, too. The use of multiple, seemingly different, cases that ultimately become one big case is the kind of thing that Ross MacDonald built his career on. Also, the use of lead characters who use drugs copiously makes Pynchon’s flights of fancy (a surf-pop band becoming ravenous zombies, for instance) work because you never really know whether these things are hallucinations caused by narcotics or by something else entirely. Also, Pynchon generally keeps his previous habit of using long, elaborate sentences well under control, replacing them with tight, hardboiled, declarative prose.

I enjoyed Inherent Vice immensely. In fact, it made me want to finally try and scale the vertiginous, and somewhat difficult, peak of Gravity’s Rainbow in the very near future. Highly recommended.

Review: Wee Rockets by Gerrard Brennan

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Joe the leader of a gang of Belfast yobs called the Wee Rockets has decided it’s time to leave the gang. Not because he feels in any way bad about what he does, but because he’s growing faster than the other gang members, and he’s worried that this will make him easier to recognise. At the same time, concerned local citizen and vigilante wannabe, Stephen McVeigh is desperate to do something about the Wee Rockets gang and stop them from attacking innocent pensioners in the area. He starts investigating, which brings him into contact with Joe and Joe’s mother, with whom he starts a relationship. Joe eventually passes the Rockets leadership over to Liam, a fat loser who desperately wants to be respected. The moment Liam takes control of the gang he ups the ante and, instead of playing safe like Joe, he gets them to move into robbing stores and younger people, because the takings are bigger. And when Joe’s criminal father also appears on the scene after many years away, the scene is set for mayhem that ultimately leads to fatalities.

Wee Rockets is the first Brennan that I have read and I must say that I was impressed by the confidence and fluidity of his writing. He is very good at fast scene-setting and renders his characters nicely in only a few sentences. The dialogue is also spot-on, with a nice grasp of how people really speak. The plotting is well handled, though I did have a few minor issues with the ending, which leaves one particular character still walking the streets when he should really be behind bars after all the mayhem he has caused. But, like I said, it’s a minor issue rather than a big deal, and is more than offset by Brennan’s confident storytelling abilities and his excellent characters. I like the fact that Joe, despite his occasional sentimental moment, remains a scumbag throughout. I also like the way that Liam’s transition from fat loser to remorseless gang-leader is realistically handled in terms of motivation. Like so many of Blasted Heath’s other publications this is an excellent crime thriller and marks them out as one of the most exciting new publishers around. Highly recommended.

The Gamblers ebook has a new look

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As much as I like it, I feel the old cover has worn out its welcome and it is time for a change. So here is the new cover design for The Gamblers. The overall design is one of my own, but it wouldn’t look the way it does without the rather lovely grunge backdrop from Buzillo Stock at Deviant Art, which I further grunged up with a couple of extra layers.

Anybody who has read the novel will know that the main character, Kandinsky, is a gambling addict with a penchant for the fruit machines, hence the skulls lined up in the way you might find them on a fruit machine – if the jackpot was blood and mayhem and general all-round nastiness.

New price structure and general news

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As of today, The Gamblers has gone up in price to £2.99 ($3.99) from its original price of £1.99. I still think this represents very good value for money, considering that the novel is somewhat over 100,00 words in length. The Hunters, which is just over 41,000 words, stays at £1.99.

From now on, any work I do will be priced this way. Anything over 75,000 words will be priced at £2.99 ($3.99); anything between 75,000 and 20,000 words will be £1.99 ($2.99); anything under 20,000 will be priced at £1 ($2); and any single short stories I release will be sold at the cheapest price that Amazon and Kobo charge for such things.

Sales of both The Hunters and The Gamblers have stalled over the last couple of months. Part of me would like to try and kick start them again, but I’m afraid I’m either just preaching to the converted or those who have no interest in listening to me beg for sales, so I’m going to let them stand on their own two feet and continue writing instead (I have enough on my plate without adding more work to the mix).

My current list of ongoing writing projects stands at: The Glasgow Grin (sequel to The Hunters), a stand-alone Stanton Brothers novella called Bone Breakers; The Greatest Show In Town a collection of short stories (featuring three or four Stanton Brothers shorts). I’ve also started initial work on a couple of other novels, but it’s mostly just notes at this stage.

The short collection is scheduled for December 2012 – and I’m going to do my best to make sure that it makes it. Everything else will now fall into the murkiness of 2013. Apologies if you’re waiting for The Glasgow Grin. But be assured that I am working on it, and I am trying to make sure that when it does finally appear it’s worth the wait.

Review: Slammer by Allan Guthrie

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Nick Glass, or Crystal as he’s known to the other screws and cons, is a rookie guard in an Edinburgh prison, having moved there after his wife had an affair. He’s not respected by either the cons or his fellow guards and his family life is hardly idyllic – his wife is a drinker and he’s having to support her and their daughter because she is pretty much unemployable. So far so bad. But when one of the cons decides that Nick is the perfect mule for importing drugs into prison things go from bad to worse. Initially Nick wants nothing to do with it but when the con uses an outsider to threaten his family, Nick has no choice but to comply. But as things get worse and Nick begins to siphon off and use the drugs he’s smuggling his tenuous grasp on reality begins to fracture completely leading to a murderous finale…

Slammer is dark psycho-noir at its finest. As the story progresses, the world begins to fold in on itself. The tale is told entirely from Nick’s point-of-view and initially gives us clues as to when his mind wanders off at a tangent. However, as things progress and the tension ratchets up several notches the barrier between what is real and what’s imagined collapses, leaving the reader struggling for the truth as desperately as the story’s protagonist. Guthrie’s prose is lean and tight and dense, often packing lots of information and clues into as small a space as possible. He drops hints into the story constantly, but due to his skill and suppleness as a writer the reader is often so caught up in the moment that the bigger picture remains a mystery. If you like your crime fiction pitch-black and nasty you’ll do a lot worse than giving this belter a read.

Review: Beautiful, Naked & Dead by Josh Stallings

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At the beginning of Beautiful, Naked and Dead Moses McGuire is one seriously damaged man. He’s in debt, works as a bouncer in a lapdancing bar, can’t afford alimony payments to his bitch of an ex and would rather eat a bullet than go on with this life. His suicide attempt is interrupted by his friend Kelly, a waitress at the club where he works, who leaves a message asking him for help. When he eventually catches up with her it is too late, she has been raped and murdered by persons unknown. He puts aside thoughts of suicide and replaces them with ones of revenge. Initially, McGuire thinks it may have been Russians but eventually the clues link her death to the Italian mob. The path leads him to Kelly’s sister, Cass, pornography, and some unpleasant gangsters who want to turn McGuire and the girl into target practice. But McGuire is tough to kill and an even tougher opponent to cross wits with and decides to hunt them instead. Leading to several bloody showdowns…

Man, Josh Stallings can write. Creating a good first-person voice is difficult to do (particularly if you misjudge the tone). Stallings gets McGuire’s voice spot-on from the get-go: a combination of Chandleresque asides and observations, spare but vivid scene-setting and a keen eye for nailing his characters dead-on (even the minor ones). Also, he’s no slouch at the action stuff, which comes in handy because there’s plenty of it, particularly later in the tale. On top of this compelling voice he builds a strong narrative that drives forward at ever increasing speed; not once does it flag. I raced through it in a couple of days, which seems to be a rarity for me nowadays (as my time is at a premium). If you fancy a top-notch read with zero flab then get yourself Beautiful, Naked and Dead today. You won’t regret it. It comes highly recommended.

Normal service will be resumed shortly

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I’ve been shit. Sorry!

A combination of intermittent work and a short story collection that won’t stop giving me grief has caused this hiatus from blogging (and from writing in general, barring the odd good day when I have been able to motivate myself). However, I have a couple of reviews to upload this week: Killing Cupid by Mark Edwards and Louise Voss; and Beautiful, Naked & Dead by Josh Stallings. Also, slowly but surely I am writing again. Not much admittedly, but not much is better than nothing.

Hell, I might just finish this damn short collection and a Stanton Brothers novellette this year. And there will always be more reviews.

So normal service will be resumed shortly.

Review: Killing Cupid by Mark Edwards & Louise Voss

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Mark Edwards and Louise Voss are excellent examples of authors who have done very well out of the self-publishing boom. Their novel Catch Your Death was one of 2011′s best-selling Kindle novels and Killing Cupid also did very well in the charts.

In fact, they were offered a book deal due to their online success and this is how I came to be reading the print edition of Killing Cupid rather than the ebook. Apparently both this novel and Catch Your Death have been amended from the ebook editions, though I obviously couldn’t say how much this changes the finished article.

The novel begins with a woman’s death, by a fall from the stairwell of her building. Alex describes fleeing the scene of the crime whilst giving the reader an indication that he’s prepared to kill for the woman he loves. The object of his affection is the teacher of a creative writing class that he attends, Siobhan.

Alex falls in love with Siobhan at first sight and becomes obsessed with her. Stalking her first on Facebook and then in the real world. Hanging around where she lives and then finally getting into her home. He becomes jealous of his teacher’s friendship with one of the other students, a female and this is where death comes into the equation. Siobhan, who is dealing with a relationship break-up, doesn’t initially realise she’s being stalked, but once Alex steals her credit card details in order to send her gifts she finally cottons on.

She kicks him off her course and threatens him with the police if he doesn’t pay her back for every penny he stole. From here the story changes tack. Alex starts a relationship with a friend of his flatmate and Siobhan begins to become obsessed with Alex, initially through interest in writing a novel but eventually through rage, and starts to take revenge on Alex and his new girlfriend. Meanwhile Alex is having to deal with the fact that a friend of the girl who fell from her stairwell is probing into her death and doesn’t believe the police’s version of events that it was accidental. As things wind to a close, Alex gets a few surprises he didn’t expect…

Edwards and Voss do a good job of making Alex come across as sympathetic, even though you know he’s a seriously screwed-up individual. They also do a good job of making Siobhan seem sympathetic in the earlier part of the novel but make her transition to angry stalker later in the story unfold realistically. The technique of narration via the character’s journals gives the story some nice turns and delivers a satisfying twist or two at the end. Killing Cupid is a good solid novel with a few narrative surprises and will give readers a lot of enjoyment. Recommended.

Review – The Killer is Dying by James Sallis

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The Killer is Dying by James Sallis: This is that rare beast – a piece of literary crime fiction. It’s not really a thriller. Hell, it’s not really even crime fiction. To be honest, I’m not really sure how you can classify it. It doesn’t contain a tightly honed plot – its structure is fairly loose; what little action there is occurs in the margins – almost outside the page; and there’s more ambiguity than resolution. Its ambitions extend beyond just entertaining the reader, particularly as a lot of its action (such as it is), themes and meanings seem to appear in the lines between the text.

An ageing killer with a terminal illness tries to find out who shot his target and why; a middle-aged cop with a dying wife investigates the shooting and deals with his own problems; a teenage boy, abandoned by his parents and left to fend for himself, is sharing the dying killer’s dreams.

Much as I like Sallis (which is a lot), I’m not sure how much I liked TKiD. As ever with Sallis it’s beautifully rendered in spare prose and the sections involving the killer and the cop are great. The problem is the almost magical realist section involving Jimmie, the boy. I didn’t buy the fact that he was having the killer’s dreams and dramatically I just didn’t get the point of having him in the story. I can understand and appreciate that community and how we relate to one another is one of the novel’s many themes, but in a sense I thought this theme was covered just as clearly in the sections involving Christian, the killer, and Sayles, the cop. In fact, I wonder what this novel would have been like as a two-hander (focussing on the killer and the cop) rather than a three-hander? Would it be better? Would it be worse? Who knows!

Don’t get me wrong, there’s much to recommend here. It’s beautifully written, thematically dense and multi-layered, and its characters are alive in a way that very few writers can achieve, but I just didn’t buy the chapters involving Jimmie, which seriously curtailed my enjoyment. However, I think maybe I need to go back to this again at a later date and re-read it. Maybe I missed something – as stated earlier a lot of stuff goes on between the lines – but I think I’d have to give it a slower, more considered read away from distractions.

Despite my serious reservations about some of it, The Killer is Dying is well worth a read, particularly for fans of Sallis.