Rust Launches! But… what IS Rust?
So I pushed the LAUNCH button on Rust Season 1, Episode 1 today. It's a pretty big moment for me. This story has been bouncing around in my head in various forms for years, and it's finally being let free, in an experimental format that could be a massive success or a colossal failure.
So I'm excited and scared and twitchy and most of all, forgetful. Because I've been talking about Rust for the past few months on Twitter, on Facebook, and on this blog, and I've only just realized that I haven't really explained yet what Rust is, or why a reader should bother with this story.
So.
In Rust, Kimberly Archer is pushed in front of a train in New York and wakes in the town of Rustwood, in bed with a strange man who claims to be her husband. She runs to the police but nobody will believe her story... nobody, aside from a strange man called Fitch.
Fitch claims that Rustwood is poisoned. That everyone in the town, himself included, died elsewhere before arriving... but that people forget, or refuse to see. That there's a beast at the heart of the town pulling everyone's strings, and that he's going to be the one to burn it out.
Fitch wants a war. Kimberly just wants to get home. They might escape if they worked together, but there are already creatures stalking them through the streets. People are vanishing fast in Rustwood, and they might be next...
Rust is a small town horror story, heavily influenced by David Cronenberg, David Lynch, Stephen King, and Junji Ito. By small town, I mean that specific genre of horror where something truly horrible strikes a little innocent community, far away from the bright lights of the big city. It's about isolation, about secrets thought long buried, about conspiracies shared between regular people instead of powerful, mysterious businessmen in ivory towers. It's about being able to reach out and touch the villain at coffee shop, and about how the wilderness is never more than a mile away.
You can't hide in a small, rural town. All you can do is run.
The first season of Rust will be published episodically, starting right now and continuing throughout July. The first season is 55k words long, or the length of a short novel, and is divided into five roughly equally sized episodes. Whether future seasons are released episodically depends on reader's reactions to this first season.
For people who don't enjoy reading in short episodes, the entire season will be released as a single book shortly after the end of episode 5. So don't worry, everyone is catered for.
If you like the sound of Rust, check it out on Amazon and sign up to my mailing list - it's the best way to make sure you don't miss out on a single episode!
