Mutated zombie-dwarves, scampering through the treetops
It's the Starved Blog Christmas edition!
Please note, there will be no further references to Christmas in this blog post.1
Thomas and the ARConauts
I’m recruiting ARC readers for my forthcoming novel, Fear the Seeded Earth. What’s an ARC reader I hear you ask.
Well, ARC stands for Advanced Review Copy. The idea is:
I send you a copy of my new book, well in advance of its release.
You read it and are awed by its majesty.
When the book is released, you go to the book’s page on Amazon, Goodreads etc, and leave a review.
So you get a free book and I get some buzz/hype from the day the book’s released.
Interested in being one of my ARConauts? Sign up with the button below - it takes you to a form to fill in. It’s likely to be spring or summer 2024 before I send out any free copies though, but I’m trying to get all my ducks in a row. If you know anyone else who might be up for it, let them know.
See the end of this post for a sneak peek at Fear the Seeded Earth!
The Starved God stuff
Video ad
A nice chap who lives near me is just getting into video editing and he made this little ad for The Starved God for me, using the blurb. Neat, huh?
The Happy Hood
I wrote a very short article for a local monthly magazine called The Happy Hood. Not sure if it will be used or not yet, but here’s the article in full:
Being father to my son, Jack, is like having a small drunk person living in my home. Hilarious, quick to laughter and anger, banging into things and falling over, stubborn as…whatever mules use as a metaphor for stubbornness. Jack has Downs syndrome and the complex needs which go with it. His arrival impacted our family profoundly, pushing us to new extremes of heartache and joy. It was inevitable that when I finally knuckled down to write a science fiction novel, his influence would be writ large upon it.
The Starved God is set in a far future, low-tech society, dominated by a powerful religion. Vitality and perseverance are the prime virtues, whereas imperfections are signs of a doomed, tainted soul. Through his rediscovery of the theory of evolution, the main character opens up a more nuanced conversation about our concept of people being ‘useful’ to society, and how we treat the most vulnerable. Like being Jack’s dad, it’s an adventure.
I’m going to appear on a man’s YouTube thing
A man called Matt Struven has a YouTube channel where he talks to self-published authors about their shit. He’s an author himself, and seems like a nice fellow and quite handsome. I’m being interviewed by him this week, not sure when it’ll actually appear on his channel though. Oh god, I hope it’s not live. For me, it’ll be 2am when he interviews me, but with enough booze I should be fine. Here’s a link to his channel, so have a butchers.
Christmas fairs in and around Northampton
I sold a few books at the Abington Park Christmas fair on the 26th of November, and the Doddridge fair on the 9th of December. I forgot to take any pictures, sorry.
Facebook writing groups are a riot
After joining a few writers’ groups on Facebook, I began to suspect that some of the literary advice to be found there was…questionable. Some of the advice seems to be little more than people repeating critiquey sounding phrases they’ve heard elsewhere, without much actual thought.
To test this, I tried a bit of mild trolling. I posted the first couple of lines of Somerset Maugham’s Of Human Bondage, a 20th Century classic, and asked people what they thought of it. I didn’t explicitly say I had written it, but I didn’t say I didn’t, either. To be fair, a few people did spot where the lines came from and some gave reasonable comments.
Here’s some of the funnier results.
Something weird, something cheered and something beard: book reviews
Reminder:
Something weird = underappreciated or outright strange SF books.
Something cheered = well known and highly rated SF books.
Something beard = SF books written by men with beards.
Something Beard: The Enodia Enigma by Christopher J Wright
[note: this author does not have a beard, but could have if he so chose.]
I bought this book from the author at an event in Kettering and he bought mine, which was nice. It’s an adventure with dual timelines, set on a planet which has been colonised by humans long ago but since diminished into a low-tech society. It jumps back and forth from one character to the other, and gradually we see how their lives are linked.
The characters are well drawn and the world believable. It may be a little slow in places but towards the end it ramps up to a nail biting finish. The quality of writing is excellent throughout. The author is a fan of Asimov’s Foundation series, and this book could well fit into that saga and would not be out of place.
Rating: 5/5
Something Weird: Crystals of Dead Lakes by Kim Aaron
I wrote a proper review on Amazon for this book, so here it is:
Given the subtitle of this collection and the rather downbeat blurb, I was expecting these stories to be rather melancholic and perhaps more driven by mood than plot. The first two stories met this expectation.
The first, Arkhangelsk, was very short and told of an old couple on a journey of some kind over a frozen wasteland. It was very well written and I was soon invested in the characters. The ending was very ambiguous however, and left me feeling that I had missed some subtle clue. I wondered if I was going to enjoy the rest of the stories if they were going to be as ambiguous as this one.
It soon became apparent as I was reading however, that the collection was much more varied than I’d expected, and in places it was riotously entertaining. Stories included a profane reimagining of Jesus’s encounter with the mob trying to stone to death an adulteress (“And verily, I say unto you: mind your own –ing business!”), a character from Peter Pan suffering Vietnam-style flashbacks about his time with the psychotic Peter, and an adventure about two students on a space cruise who find themselves responsible for saving a distant colony from an AI alien threat.
The story which really stood out for me was The Man Whose Face was a Mirror, which tells of a psychopathic young girl and her machinations against her sister and mother, with a supernatural twist. It was really dark and laced through with true gallows humour, like something by Shirley Jackson or Patricia Highsmith, and maybe Brett Easton-Ellis. I won’t forget the garage scene in a hurry.
The standard of writing was excellent throughout. The author has a good ear for dialogue, a wry turn of phrase and a light touch when it comes to describing events. The third person narratives ‘head-hop’ between different characters which I believe some people turn their nose up at, but I enjoyed it. There was a short poem between the first and second stories, which I wasn’t expecting but liked well enough.
A major problem with this book - the only one really - was the sheer number of errors of various type, and for that I’m knocking off a star. The first-line indent at the start of paragraphs was too large, and the first paragraph of a section or chapter should not have the indent. Call me a pedant but I found it distracting. There were a lot of typos, and some larger errors: in The Man Whose Face was a Mirror there seemed to be a whole section that was repeated later in the story, almost word for word (the bit with the thing in the closet being described as like a puma or jaguar). In the story 14 Months, Sadie’s name was changed to Sabina a couple of times. For what is a fairly short book, these errors were pretty poor.
Overall this was a highly entertaining, varied and memorable read and I highly recommend it. The blurb doesn’t do it justice.
Rating: 4 innocent baby birds that never harmed anyone out of 5
Something Cheered: Outland by Dennis E. Taylor
Sadly, this was not written by the giant-spectacled Irish snooker legend (above, centre), but by an American man. It’s about some students in America who create a portal to an alternative Earth, more than one alt-Earth in fact. They have the fine idea of mining gold in an alternative Earth where no humans live, but then Yellowstone erupts in our world and knackers everything up, so the stakes are suddenly a lot higher.
It’s pretty good, though I wanted the plot toove along faster. A lot of the characters who you’re meant to sympathise with are a bit annoying, but there’s enough to keep you entertained. Not nearly as entertaining as the 1985 World Snooker Championship final though.
Rating: 3 comeback kids out of 5.
Book funnel links: adverts for mine and other’s people’s shit.
Sigh…here’s some links which will take you to a selection of books by other desperate authors. For reasons too boring to explain, clicking on the links helps me out. You might find something you like, who knows?
Fantasy and Science Fiction Christmas Gifts
Fear the Seeded Earth, sneak preview
Here’s a little slice of fun from my forthcoming alien invasion novel, Fear the Seeded Earth. I’ll be posting more snippets in the coming months. Remember, you can get it early and free by signing up to be an ARC reader - go back to the top for details.
For now, she closed the curtains and slouched on the sofa in front of the television with a mug of tea and a box of chocolate fingers. No noise from the neighbours on the other side, for a change. Usually, if the young couple were not screaming at each other and smashing stuff, then their godforsaken beagle was baying as if experiencing a psychological meltdown of its own. Sometimes these coincided in a ludicrous cacophony, sounding slightly less relaxing than the average exorcism. But for now, blissful silence. Scrolling through the horror section on Netflix for something relaxing, she settled on Phantasm III: Lord of the Dead.
She sat with her fingers laced behind her head and her feet propped on the coffee table, while a man on the screen fled through a dark forest from a very angry mutated zombie-dwarf wearing a hooded robe, but her gaze kept sliding to her handbag on the rug, while a familiar urge itched her mind. The itch grew relentlessly until, with a sigh, she reached for the bag and pulled out a card of tramadol. The pain from her hip was not that bad nowadays, not really. Time to quit now, cut down at least.
But not today.
She washed a fifty-milligram tablet down with a swig of tea, then after a few seconds’ consideration, another. The man on the screen vapourised the zombie-dwarf’s head with a modified shotgun, but there were more of them, dozens in fact, scampering through the treetops.
Apart from in the adverts near the end.