Daniel I. Russell's Blog, page 10

Samhane cover revealed

Well folks, here it is. The draft cover for the English/U.S. version of Samhane, available in print very soon.

This isn't the finished version. Our layout demi-god Danny Evarts of Shroud Magazine and It's Okay to be a Zombie infamy, is still tinkering with the fonts and shades and lighting and all the other stuff I have no idea about. We also have a blurb to put on the cover. But generally, should you wish (and please, do) to part with your well-earned cash on a copy, this is what will be gracing your shelves. The cover image is by Patrick McWhorter, an artist I have raved about on here in the past. See the older posts for more of his stunning work.

The book should be available on prerelease over the next couple of days over at Necrotic Tissue , with Amazon not too far behind. The book should be officially out in the next few weeks.

As for the German edition of Samhane, pictured to the left, well, what can I say? Thank you to Torsten Scheib and Michael Preissl for all the work they've put in, and a big thank you to German readers who have already ordered their copy and said such kind things about their interest. I hope the book meets your expectations. And also thank you to Werner Placho for recommending me in the first place, and also singing like Marilyn Monroe.

The GERMAN edition can be ordered right now at Voodoo Press or from Amazon Germany .

So what else has been happening? Not a lot to be honest. What with my students having finished their exams (and my science kids did great on the whole. Well done, guys) and this weekend being my 30th Birthday, I've been taking it easy, as per the photo below which was taken in my new hammock. Great thing is that I can actually write while in it! I'm afraid the level of comfort achieved may influence my future works. Goodbye extreme horror, hello light hearted yarns about idiot girls trying to find love in the big city.

As with any birthday, my to be read pile has grown once again with books by Richard Laymon, Bentley Little, John Ajvide Lindquist (a nice Hardback at that!), Peter Straub and S.D. Hintz. Already finished one of the Laymons. Another review to write, I guess!

A lot of my writing time has been taken up by the blog tour, and I would again like to thank Jim McLeod at Ginger Nuts of Horror , Sarah Masters at her blog page and Shaun Jeffrey's IN The Shadows thus far for putting up with me on their blogs. The next stop, which is moved to the States, should be up in the next few days. It's been a lot of fun, and I'm glad it's going to continue through the month.

I'm off for more relaxation, Old Speckled Hen and cake. See you for the Ohio blog stop!

World Blog Tour date 3: North England

Seems that members of the Cult of Zandathru are on my trail, so odd that fate has another kind of Kult in store for me.

With the hire car making an odd ticking sound from underneath (and an even weirder crunching and slobbering from something in the glove box that smelled of ammonia. Who knows what they put in there. It seemed to be feeding on the A to Z of the Midlands, and I was quite content to leave it to its own devices), I decided to take the train up through Birmingham and onto Wigan and Ormskirk. Surely my old haunts would be safe?

In Wigan, the Tudor pub was full of pale, pierced and tattooed weirdies, who glared at me over their snakebite and blacks. Ordinarily, there's nothing abnormal about this, but this WASN'T a Friday night! Concerned, I fled to the bus station and grabbed a 395 to Ormskirk. Things weren't that much better, as this being the town that Samhane is based on, all kinds of freaks were walking the streets. Geoff, the pensioner on roller-blades (I'm not making this up! Research it.) sped away from a ravenous pack of zombies (okay, the zombies I made up, a little), and the Passage to India, rather than serving up fine Indian cuisine, was providing a passage to a fiery hell. It may have been the Vindaloo that caused it: too many finger chillies. It took a team of us, armed with lager, naan breads and toilet paper, to close the flaming gateway.

But for how long?

Needing to rest and stay one step ahead of the followers of Zandathru, I hopped on a train again and arrived at the mecca of trainspotters, Crewe.

Here I was taken in by a decorated fellow who lived beside a cemetery. He knew exactly how I felt, having been on the same journey for longer. He'd just got back from California, where his own creations had literally come to life before his very eyes! The man was Shaun Jeffrey, writer of such esteemed books as The Kult and Deadfall, both from Leucrota Press. As night descended, we shared a drop of the good stuff and discussed this crazy writer journey. Here's what transpired In the Shadows.

The Conqueror Worms by Brian Keene

The Keeneathon continues with his 2006 book, The Conqueror Worms. Now, when people mention Brian, they usually ask if you've read The Rising. The Rising is considered to be his 'hit', but after fellow readers have enquired about The Rising, the next one, I've found, is The Conqueror Worms.

I thought that The Rising was okay. My preferred Keene book so far has been The Ghoul, which was reviewed earlier this month. Could Worms take the crown?

Teddy, and 80 year old man living alone in West Pennsylvania, is writing. Cold, wet and injured, he intends to record his story before his injuries take his life. What a story he has to tell. The rains started all over the world over a month ago. Tsunamis destroyed the coastlines, and most of the mainland has flooded, leaving bands of survivors stranded on mountain peaks or the tops of high rises. The rains aren't just the only thing that has come: sea monsters have emerged from the depths, and from the earth come the giant worms.

The Conqueror Worms is a very intimate story, and we stick close to Teddy for the first and final acts. We have an elderly man, alone and afraid, trying to survive. It doesn't get any simpler. And to have an old man as the hero, it adds to the characterisation in spades. He's suffering from nicotine withdrawal and the usual aches and pains of old age. Plus, he has to deal with the probable loss of his children and grandchildren as well as watching the rains destroy his house and the keepsakes of his marriage. To be honest, the giant creatures and action were a bonus. Teddy's plight had meat enough to keep this reader turning the pages.

Keene's cast of supporting characters are well above average here. Carl, Teddy's best friend, is likeable enough, and Earl next door is a crazy, shotgun toting, conspirator theorist. Good stuff.

Things change in the second act as we leave Teddy and co on the moment fending off the worms. Now we see how a band of survivors in a coastal city have fared. There are two rival groups: a bunch of peaceful people living in the top few floors of a hotel, and the group they've dubbed the Satanists. The Satanists are into chants and human sacrifice.

Welcome to the Lovecraft lite! This part of the story in particular is very, very Lovecraft (thing Dagon) and Keene succeeds in putting his own stamp on things. You can see that this is Lovecraft inspired, not Lovecraft ripped off. While this bit may be seen like padding, a digressing romp to get the story up to novel length, I loved it. It actually worked to get away from the worms before it got repetitive, deal with the sea monsters, and then get back to some finale wormage. For me it worked.

The only thing that annoyed me here is Keene's insistence on putting gang members into every situation. The yo, yo, yo, dawg dialogue gets very annoying very quickly. Maybe this was why I enjoyed The Ghoul so much, it was set before hip hop.

The Conqueror Worms ends nice and satisfying, yet still has the legs for a sequel (no pun intended). A few strands of the story were not fully explained and their potential not leapt upon, very similar to Sarah Pinborough's Breeding Ground which I reviewed this week. Two post-apocalyptic novels back to back? Yes, it's all been doom and gloom! Funnily enough, since I started The Conqueror Worms two days ago, it's done nothing but rain…

In answer to my earlier question, yes, I think that The Conqueror Worms is by far my favourite Brian Keene book thus far. I think I read the first 100 pages in one uninterrupted sitting. I hate to say this, as I'm against this kind of thing, but if this book was twice as long and more 'literary', it really could have made some waves in the mainstream. As it stands now, we have a fast paced cracker that's as tight as…well…an asshole in a bucket of worms.

Tickled your fancy? The link to buy is on the left.

Breeding Ground by Sarah Pinborough

Drum roll please...

AS followers of my reviews will know (and without being sexist), I'm constantly on the look out for a female writer who can stand shoulder to shoulder with the big boys, a writer who is not afraid of violence or gore or plain out shocking terror!

I've read another book from Pinborough, The Reckoning, and while it was an enjoyable ride with some great moments (and I'll never look at an ant the same way again) I felt there was still another horror gear that Sarah could slip into...probably with an easier transition than her horror-writing sisters.

Breeding Ground...I'd heard rumours about, I'd heard that this book is harrowing, so was keen to get hold of a copy. Is Pinborough the queen of balls to the wall horror?

Based on my reading, and for the moment, I'd have to say yes. But tenuously.

Breeding Ground follows a young professional couple, Matt, a mortgage advisor, and Chloe, a barrister (what no writer? Pinborough is awarded a point already!). The apocalypse comes slow, and through the women of the world. With their wifes, partners, mothers and sisters growing fat and displaying very odd symptoms of pregnancy, the men are too concerned with what's going on in their own homes rather than seeing the bigger picture. The governments are deathly silent, as they don't have a clue what's going on. Most men hide in the bliss of ignorance, or the bottle. Matt has bigger concerns, not only for the health of Cloe, but for their unborn baby.

Soon (within the first 50 pages) the severely altered females of the world give birth to spidery creatures. The earth now has a new dominant species. Matt flees, desperate to find survivors, but how will they survive this harsh new world?

The one thing I adore about this book is what I call the fake mirror shot. Every watched a horror film and the scream queen on screen (try saying that one five times fast!) is getting ready for a shower, for example. She opens the medicine cabinet mirror, closes it and then...! No, hang on. The killer ISN'T standing behind her in the reflection? Sneaky buggers! Sarah does this in spades as at times, you're 100% sure which way things are going to go, and then they simply don't. For example, the merry band of survivors (including a few women, but we'll come to that later) come across a military installation containing a few males survivors. 28 Days Later, I hear you cry? Soldiers wanting to rape the women? Yeah, that's what I thought. But no, Sarah stays away from the normal conventions.

In fact she has a very well thought yarn here. Some aspects you really don't see coming, including the quite bizarre but possibly solution to their problems. One of my problems with the novel though are that some questions remained unanswered. For example, while the cause of the spider epidemic is touched on, it's never explained. Nor is the sudden and extreme change of the English climate (although this review theorised how one was responsible for the other). And again, some women survive, and some merely take a lot longer to be infected. One reason for this was very apparent but what about the others.

Hopefully, this will all be rectified in the follow up book, Feeding Ground, which I'll have to get my grubby mits on, because the biggest problem with the book is the ending. It doesn't really have an ending. Like some of the characters discuss in the novel, this might only be the first phase. Who knows where it's going to go? Breeding Ground as it stands just kind of stops after the last big revelation...but boy...is it a corker of a revelation!

And yes, we have a female writer who can really dish out the gore! The first act of the book, Chloe's transformation, the birth of the spiders and Matt's first outing into the post apocalyptic world really are harrowing. An early scene, wherein Matt discovers his first widow (the term later adopted to the spiders) is truly tense and disturbing. Sarah also produces one of the most hated villains I've read in a long time. You don't need to have your bad guy be the master mind behind it all, etc. Sarah has created a character that was so easy to hate and have fun doing it!

In summary, while there is the odd problem (again, hopefully filled in by Feeding Ground, and speaking of filling in, why did the nice guy protagonist have sex with 75% of the fenale characters?) Breeding Ground is definitely worth a buy. Creature horror at its best - horrific, chilling and visceral.

Samhane blog tour date 2 - Southern England

Okay, so this is weird.

After narrowly escaping the clutches of Jim and his Ginger Nuts of horror on the first blog date (see archives), I drove the hell out of Scotland, intending to stop in my home town of Wigan in the north west of England. However, and you know how it goes, I got distracted and made a few wrong turns. Being a man and thus REFUSING to ask for directions, I accidentally ended up in...the deep south, which for England is the posh bit.

Which is kinda convenient, as that was due to be the location of the massive Samhane World Blog Tour second date!

But then things got reeeeally weird. I roll into the blog, being fashionably late and still aching from the long drive, and what am I told? I'm too late. They've already got somebody else.

Bollocks!

I thought I'd sit and wait for an hour or two, you know, in case they could fit me in at the end? Hell, most of the time in Scotland was spent tied to a chair, so waiting was no problem. I watched as an immaculately dressed man clutching a laptop went inside. Hmmm. I was SURE I recognised his face.

I snuck closer and listened at the door. It sounded like an infomercial was being recorded. Had I been bumped for a salesman?

It transpired that something a lot dodgier was taking place, and someone was going through a lot of trouble to spread some horrific propaganda about yours truly. Take a look...over at Sarah Master's blog page.

Right to Life by Jack Ketchum

It can be very easy to typecast writers, especially horror writers. Peter Benchley wrote Jaws and The Deep and was from then on marine-horror guy. Can it be that to read two books with a similar theme by the same author means to place them in a box? If so, I hope readers thinking of sampling the works of Jack Ketchum will swap and choose. Should you read Offspring and Off Season, both great reads, one might think that Ketchum is cannibal-guy. In this case, should the two books in question be The Girl Next Door and Right to Life, well...

I wouldn't want to see what Jack has in his basement.

Right to Life is a novella of about 140 pages from Edge Books. Sara is in a loving relationship with Greg, which is all well and good if you don't consider his wife and son. Matters are even more complicated as Sara is 3 months pregnant with his child. It's the logical choice to have an abortion is it not? What kind of life would this child have? Sara is determined to go through the procedure, even if she has to walk past the Pro-life protesters with their signs and chants outside the clinic.

Only Sara doesn't get to make her choice as she is grabbed, drugged and bundled into a car. She awakes in her underwear, locked in a long, wooden box. She's in the home of Stephen and Kath Teach, and teaching is exactly what's on their mind. Sara will learn that some people can't have children, and those that can should show more respect to the life growing inside them. She'll also learn to obey at all times, no matter what. Stephen is very keen on that...

We're entering the basement of Ketchum's mind once more in a very, very similar vein to The Girl Next Door. The biggest difference of course is the setting. We're in the last few years rather than the 50's. This doesn't really bode well for poor Sara, as nowadays you can buy plenty of bondage gear online, cashiers in sex shops barely bat an eyelid, and with all the shows on DIY, even an amateur can build the most rudimentary of torture devices (and even more bad news...Stephen is a carpenter!). So the continuous (and I do mean continuous!) pain and humiliation gets a facelift.

But far from this being a one trick pony, Ketchum does infuse a little deep thinking in there, especially regarding the title of the book. The topic of abortion is clearly addressed, with Ketchum showing both sides of the argument fairly equally. Okay, his Pro-life couple may be absolutely crazy, but that's just the sauce on the meat.

I actually thought this was an uplifting book, rather than the doom and gloom of Girl Next Door (which in it's own right is a tremendously dark and touching novel). You're really hoping that Sara will pull through, despite her weaknesses. The gore is severely reduced compared to some other of Jack's novels, which shows that he can restrain himself when necessary. Sure, there is violence and suffering, but it's not wall to wall blood.

My only gripe, as with Next Door, is that the antagonists deserve more justice come the conclusion.

The two bonus short stories in this edition are the standard Ketchum high quality. Brave Girl is a very quick read, that is kinda the opposite story to the main feature. Again, Ketchum shows his serious side and highlights issues in a more subtle manner. I think that some of his critics (in the bio it states that The Village Voice reviewed Off Season with simply YECHH) should read his very thoughtful and poignant shorter works. Returns is a story I've read before and confirms my thoughts that Jack is definitely a cat person.

I read this novella in a single morning. I had to. I usually read at the school and while my son does his karate class, but I felt that the cover (naked, pregnant lady, gagged and blindfolded with a tight leather belt across her nipples) might not be suitable, especially for the head of science.

Like Girl Next Door? You'll adore this. If not, I would recommend it first and then get this...if you're kinky like that.

Blog tour 1st stop - Scotland!

On a day like today (when the temperature nearly reach 95 and it's the middle of Spring, mind you), it's nice to travel to cooler climates. So I'm travelling from Perth, Australia to Perth, Scotland...traveling south, past Dundee and Dunfermline...to...

Well, I can't disclose the physical location. There is a strong following of Zandathru God of Chaos here. The inhabitants are known to obliterate creatures, dismember the corpses, grind up the internal organs and stick it in the stomach. After the membranous bag is boiled, the followers then eat it and wash it down with a cold quaff of Tennants Super. Yes, we're in the Highlands now.

Having been knocked out in a dark alleyway, trying to listen to a couple of women converse with their luscious accents, I was clubbed and awoke, dazed and confused, in a pleasant front room. An angry man with a long beard held a poker in the fire, which he then waved threateningly before my face. He had questions...many questions...

Find out what happened at the Gingernuts of Horror!

Ghoul by Brian Keene

It's time for me to start on my Brian Keene backlog. Following The Rising, Castaways and Urban Gothic, it's now time for...

The Ghoul!

Timmy lives with his parents next to an old church with an ancient graveyard. His friend Barrie is the son of the cemetery caretaker, and his other friend Doug lives with his alcoholic mother. It's the summer of 1984, and while the boys have plans to sit around listening to Slade and the newer bands like Metallica, playing Atari and generally goofing around, fate has different ideas. Barrie's heavily alcoholic and violent father has broken a stone tablet in the graveyard that kept a creature sleeping beneath the ground. Now that creature is out, feasting on the dead and searching for a female...

I don't know what it was about the opener, but I got the impression that I wouldn't enjoy this book. It bordered on tacky, but in hindsight, perhaps was written this way on purpose, as it read like a scene from one of the many slasher flicks predominant at the time. The dialogue is grown worthy, and the plot of two young lovers getting it on under the moon in a graveyard? Seeing a figure that isn't there a split second later? I was hoping that the rest of the novel wasn't like this.

And it wasn't! The main characters are very sympathetic and surprisingly likable. In one scene, Timmy's world is destroyed by his father, and I don't mean with violence or anything sexual...but by god it hits you. You're there and know that something similar happened to you with your parents at that age.

The gore is there, but lighter compared to other Keene books. The Ghoul himself is actually quite likable as antagonist. He even speaks like Thor at times, which is always a plus for me.He has simple needs and just wants to get on with his existence, even if that means eating corpses and raping women in tunnels (no pun intended).

My favourite chapter of the book follows the ghoul as he eats the corpses in the graveyard, telling the lives of each one, be them good or bad, and how they all ended up with the same fate: dead and food for the ghoul.

There's a great spirit of adventure and preadolescent awakening in the trio of boys, and I think this is why the book works so well. With, say three teenagers on camp dealing with this, or three 20 somethings at college discovering a ghoul...this book might have been a flop. It's not the creature, nor the setting that make this novel, it's those boys. Most of us had that one perfect summer when we were around 12, and this book brings back all those memories. Not that I had to fight a ghoul back in Wigan in 1992, you understand.

This was a startling little gem of a book, with better character development than other Keene books (even the supporting characters have their interesting quirks) and a story that pulls you in. It was a perfect read for Halloween and certainly worth a look. Keene fans should certainly have this towards the top end of their favourites.

Blog world tour...ish

Here are the dates and locations of my blog world tour for the run up to Samhane release. We shall see it as a 'followers of Zandathru' virtual trip, where I shall be visiting the various chaos cults throughout the world. On the less fictional side, there will also be interviews and single, in depth questions about writing and the publishing industry.

3rd Nov: Ginger Nuts of Horror SCOT
6th Nov: Sarah Masters ENG
10th Nov: TBC ENG
13th Nov: Rebecca Besser USA
17th Nov: S.D. Hintz USA
20th Nov: Louise Bohmer CAN

Dates to be confirmed:

Voodoo Press GER
Stygian Publications USA

For your information, I shall be visualising the little plane on the Street Fighter 2 character select screen as I go from country to country.

Please note that we only have one GERMAN site and no AUSTRALIAN sites. I would love this not to be the case. If you run a site concerned with books, writing or horror and live in these countries (or even if you don't, but especially if you do or any country not mentioned) shoot me an email at danielirussell@necrotictissue.com.

Blurbs and news

It's nearly four in the morning. Oh, and that's a Saturday morning. Why am I up so early on my day off? Thank my son, who is one year old on Tuesday. If he isn't shouting or crying, he's kicking the sides of the cot and being a general arse (teething, eh?). But at least I have time to get this blog post and update done. There might not be many zombies in this, despite me feeling like one...

THE BIG SAMHANE UPDATE

While it may not seem that much has been happening on the Samhane front of late, there's been a lot of behind the scenes stuff going on.

Danny Evarts, of Shroud Magazine and It's Okay to be a Zombie fame (my no zombies thing didn't last long), has been working tirelessly to put the book together. His interior layouts are the best I've ever seen and there is nothing this man cannot do (so I've heard).

He is currently finishing the front and back covers. While the art was completed by uber-artist Patrick McWhorter a few weeks back (see older posts for examples of his work), we're still waiting on a few nice blurbs to slap on there before it all comes together.

This is a perfect example of having been developed as a writer. I know for a fact that several years ago I would have been more impatient and wanted my book out asap. DAMN THE CONSEQUENCES! But now, and after going through this process once with Wild Child Publishing (and there will be more on that later) I don't want to have any regrets. To wait a few weeks here and there to get everything perfect is just fine by me. So happy that Danny, Patrick and especially R. Scott McCoy have been so patient and understanding...especially when I demanded my study to be filled with black roses and any emails to be sprayed with my own personal fragrance (odour l'horreur) before I read them.

Speaking of blurbs, we've received these BEAUTIES:

"Horror lovers rejoice--you're about to be scared...or scarred. Russell's well-crafted nightmares will haunt you long after you've closed the pages of Samhane!" Fran Friel, Bram Stoker Finalist-MAMA'S BOY AND OTHER DARK TALES

"My, oh my does it get wet within these pages, dear friends." Shroud Magazine (taken from their prerelease review which should be out when the cover is done and a release date set)

Glad to see that people are liking what they read!

THE OLD EDITION

Yes, yes. The old edition, it seems, is still available despite the rights expiring on the 28th of October. I will be trying to address this later today, so please do not buy the Samhane ebook from Wild Child Publishing, Fictionwise or any other affiliate company. They do not have the rights and I will not see any money from it.

BLOG WORLD TOUR

In the run up to release, I will be virtually touring the world via the blogs of other writers/editors/readers. Stops have been confirmed in England, Scotland and Australia. I would really love to visit some German sites, as the German version of Samhane will be going to the printers for the test copies next week.

Should you want me soiling your blog over the next three weeks, please email me at danielirussell@necrotictissue.com.

I will be posting links and dates when I have a list.