Andy Graham Author

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One Book Interview #53 – Richard Writhen (Author)

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After a short hiatus needed because of the blood-fuelled poetry and prose of the last author to grace these pages, the One Book Interview is back.

This week we have a writer who has been published in various online magazines, has published several novellas and is currently working on his first novel.

Good people of the Internet, writing out of Rhode Island – Richard Writhen

Name one book:

1 – everyone should read

The best book that I’ve read in recent years is Mystic River by Dennis Lehane. It’s a very dark and realistic mystery and deftly manages many plot threads at once. I had seen the film awhile after it came out on video and was really blown away, so when I later saw the novel at The Strand, I picked it up and read it in full at least thrice. The tone, the characterization, but above all the way the characters’ actions ring true to real human behavior all make this book something special for me. Plus, without giving any spoilers, the way it accurately reflects the true human lack of control over chaos makes for the perfect ending.

2 – you would take with you if you were going to be marooned on Mars

I would say The Martian, but I haven’t read it. Maybe Call of the Wild, which is one of my favorite books. It’s about a dog who starts out as a pet but is dognapped and forced to become a hard-working sled dog. But it’s really about surviving at all costs and finding the alpha within yourself. He fights and fights and at one point is on the verge of death but he never surrenders. And eventually, he finds satisfaction, not in a perfect life like he once had, but in the fulfillment of his destiny.

3 – you took a chance on and were pleasantly surprised by

The Lovely Bones. Every once in a while I will read something from a genre or sub-genre that I have little interest in based on the title alone. I knew I had to check this one out so I picked it up used and was pretty taken with it. A quaint story about a girl who is murdered but winds up in the afterlife a la Beetlejuice or whatever and she tries to communicate with her surviving friends and family and point them towards her killer. It had a grimdark feel to the deaths and the repercussions for the characters. Another thing I would liken it to is What Dreams May Come.

4 – you’ve written that is your favourite

The Hiss Of The Blade. I think that by my third novella, I had gotten a bit better and the style is a bit more mature than the first two. Plus, it’s a bloodbath, which is optimal for me. I’m a big fan of French extreme cinema like Haute Tension and Inside.  It’s also more grimdark, with an evil king and armored guards and castles and gauntlets and all that jazz. And a bunch of blades too, of course.

5 – that has influenced you most as a person

Well, aside from Call of the Wild, it’d probably be Watership Down. There’s so much happening in that one novel that it’d take a college philosophy course to cover it all, but some of the standout points for me are the accurate portrayal of spirituality, again the survival against all odds motif, the deception between members of the same species, the betrayals, the almost god-like power that humankind and even cats have over the small animals like the rabbits.

6 – that has influenced you most as a professional

The most influential book that I’ve read in the past few years would have to be A Head Full of Ghosts by Paul Tremblay. Aside from being astonishingly well-written, its grasp of subtext and meta is unparalleled. The only novel that I would really liken it to is Cormac McCarthy’s The Road; both of them are basically experiences like real life, and while you are reading them, the point of it all is not immediately evident. It’s entertaining, but the real brilliance in such a book is after it ends, when you are (hopefully) blindsided by the real message as the pieces fall into place like so many puzzle pieces in your mind, as you sort it out. That’s really the approach that I have now; it’s not a thousand pages that you need to throw at the reader, but rather a level of veracity and internal continuity that makes the contents of the book literally live in the reader’s mind. And few authors can really do it.

7 – of yours that prospective readers should start with if they want to get to know your work and where they can get it.

It stands to reason that my shortest, simplest novella is my first, A Kicked Cur. It took much longer to write because I worked on it as an amateur, only once or twice a month, before I became more serious about my writing. The process took about two years and four months, but I’m happy with it, though no work wrought by human hands is ever finished. The second and third novellas were much faster, taking about eight months apiece once I had adopted the “nulla dies sine linear” approach. The fourth is at about that same mark now, but is going to take a bit longer to complete,  so about a year.

You can find Richard here.

Originally from Rhode Island, Richard Writhen also lived in NYC for about ten years. He has been e-published on several notable sites such as the Dark Mondays Blog, the Mighty Thor JRS Blog, Michael R Fletcher.com, Rob J Hayes.co.uk, Grimdarkmagazine.com and Ragnarokpub.com and is the author of three novellas on Amazon KDP: A Kicked Cur, A Host of Ills and The Hiss Of The Blade. Richard also writes short form stories in the styles of Gothdark, Grimdark, GDSF and Psychological Horror, and will eventually be exploring the weird west.

 

 

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One Book Interview #52 – Anna Smith Spark (Author)

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The One Book Interview is one-year old today.

We’ve had fifty-two weeks of authors talking about their favourite books.

To celebrate, we’ve got a fantastic interview from a big name in the world of dark fantasy.

Author 52 writes. Vicious. Dark. Bloody.

“A wise man who’s ignored is about as effective as an idiot who’s listened to.”

Her book, The Court of The Broken Knives, has been nominated in the David Gemmell Morningstar Awards for Best Debut Novel of 2017. (You can vote here.)

Good people of the Internet, writing out of London – Anna Smith Spark

Name one book:

1 – everyone should read

Viriconium by M John Harrison. ‘The aristocratic thugs of the High City whistle as they go about their factional games amongst the derelict observatories and abandoned fortifications at Lowth […] Next day some minor prince is discovered in the gutter with his throat cut, and all you are left with is the impression of secret wars, lethal patience, an intelligent maneuvering in the dark.’ It’s a fiercely literary, complex, many-layered series of stories about the city of Viriconium –  the city, the fantasy city of which we all dream. It’s epic fantasy, and a critique of epic fantasy. It’s an exploration of writing and dreaming, of the memory of the past, of the grieving desire for another world. It’s a work of melancholy genius.

2 – you would take with you if you were going to be marooned on Mars

War and Peace. I’ve read it twice, and got so much out of it both times. It has everything – the war scenes are fantastic, Tolstoy fought in the siege of Sebastopol and had seen warfare first hand; it’s a sweepingly romantic melodrama; it’s a delicate study of human life. I responded to the characters very differently on my first and second reading, and I suspect I’d see them afresh, think about them in new ways, understand them better and differently, with each reread. It’s certainly not a book one could easy exhaust. It’s also very long, which would be useful here.

3 – you took a chance on and were pleasantly surprised by

Philippa Gregory’s The Other Boleyn Girl. ‘I could hear a roll of muffled drums. But I could see nothing but the lacing on the bodice of the lady standing in front of me, blocking my view of the scaffold.’  I love historical novels, Mary Renault, Mary Stewart and Hilary Mantel are authors that I return to again and again; I read a lot of military historical fiction by authors like Christian Cameron.  But I was rather, uh, dubious about Philippa Gregory. I was delighted, actually, she evokes the poisonous atmosphere of Henry VIII’s court very well, her Anne Boleyn is a tragic, horrifying figure.

4 – you’ve written that is your favourite

The Court of Broken Knives will always be the most precious thing I’ve written, because it’s the first book I wrote. There are still passages there that I read and think ‘Yes! That’s perfect! My god, I wrote that!’ But The Tower of Living and Dying is I think where I’ve completely found myself as a writer. ‘In the tall house in Toreth Harbour, the High Priestess Thalia lay awake in the darkness’.

5 – that has influenced you most as a person

The Weirdstone of Brisingamen by Alan Garner. ‘At dawn one still October day in the long ago of the world, across the hill of Alderly, a farmer from Mobberley was riding to Macclesfield fair.’ A classic children’s fantasy, in which two children find themselves immersed in a world of elves, dwarves, wizards and evil powers that exists just out of ordinary vision within their own world of mid-20th century Cheshire. My father read it to me as a child. I’ve never stopped searching for the dwarves and elves and magic hiding in the English landscape.  I’ve been out on the Yorkshire moors and the East Anglian salt marshes at night…. one day I’ll find the door in the hollow hills open, walk through.

6 – that has influenced you most as a professional

The Wasteland.   

‘April is the cruellest month, breeding

Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing

Memory and desire, stirring

Dull roots with spring rain.’

I’ve grown up with modernist poetry, I was writing poetry before I was writing prose fiction. There’s imagery from The Wasteland scattered throughout my own writing.  Fragments, multiple voices, juxtaposition, the breakdown of narrative order, the search for the numinous in the mundane: modernist poetry has profoundly shaped my writing.

7 – of yours that prospective readers should start with if they want to get to know your work and where they can get it.

The Court of Broken Knives.‘Knives. Knives everywhere. Coming down like rain.’ It’s the first book in the Empires of Dust series, sets out the world that I write and live the better half of my life in. I was discovering the world as I wrote it, the history and the geography of Irlast, its stories, its language emerged as I wrote the book. So that’s the obvious place to start. It starts simply enough, then the world slowly opens itself up.

You can find Anna here.

You can vote in the David Gemmell Awards here.

Anna Smith Spark is the author of the critically acclaimed Empires of Dust grimdark epic fantasy series. The Court of Broken Knives is out now with Harper Voyager (UK/world) and Orbit (US/Can); The Tower of Living and Dying will be published in summer 2018. Her favourite authors are Mary Renault, R Scott Bakker and M. John Harrison. Previous jobs include English teacher, petty bureaucrat and fetish model. You may know her by the heels of her shoes.

 

 

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One Book Interview #51 – Andy Peloquin (Author)

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“Fantasy transcends age, gender, religion, race, or lifestyle.”

As the One Book Interview moves into its second half century, we’re lucky enough to have another award winning writer with us.

“It is our way of believing what cannot be, delving into the unknowable.”

Author 51’s  dark fantasy books have hundreds of positive reviews on Amazon US alone.

“It is a way of discovering hidden truths about ourselves and our world in a brand new way.”

Good people of the Internet, writing out of Somewhere in the US – Andy Peloquin

Name one book:

1 – everyone should read

The Complete Works of Sherlock Holmes.

No one else will ever be as spectacularly clever, and no matter how many times I’ve read this series, I can keep reading it and still find new surprises and discoveries.

2 – you would take with you if you were going to be marooned on Mars

Warlord of Mars.

I know it’s fiction, but it would make me so happy to imagine myself as John Carter of Mars, leaping around the planet, swinging his sword, and being a total bad-ass!

3 – you took a chance on and were pleasantly surprised by

Kings of the Wyld by Nicholas Eames.

I’m the sort of person who DOESN’T do something just because everyone tells me I should. My Fantasy Fiends Podcast co-host told me to read the book pretty much every week for three months. When I finally caved and read it, I was very happy I did

4 – you’ve written that is your favourite

Thief of the Night Guild (Queen of Thieves Book 2)

It’s one hell of an action-adventure heist story, and a whole lot of fun to write.

5 – that has influenced you most as a person

Probably The Chronicles of Narnia, specifically The Last Battle.

There’s one scene at the end where Aslan (the Jesus-esque character) tells one of the people, “All the good things you did in the name of the bad god went to my credit, and all the bad things done in my name went to the credit of the bad god.” Basically, it made me realize that the name—God, Yahweh, Allah, the universe, Gaia, and so on—doesn’t really matter. All that matters is the intention, action, and outcome.

6 – that has influenced you most as a professional

The Lies of Locke Lamora by Scott Lynch.

It set the bar high for me to write amazing characters!

7 – of yours that prospective readers should start with if they want to get to know your work and where they can get it.


Child of the Night Guild (Queen of Thieves Book 1)

It’s the introduction to the Queen of Thieves series, and the beginning of journeys that will span 10 full-length novels.

You can find Andy here.

 

I am, first and foremost, a storyteller and an artist–words are my palette. Fantasy is my genre of choice, and I love to explore the darker side of human nature through the filter of fantasy heroes, villains, and everything in between. I’m also a freelance writer, a book lover, and a guy who just loves to meet new people and spend hours talking about my fascination for the worlds I encounter in the pages of fantasy novels.

Fantasy provides us with an escape, a way to forget about our mundane problems and step into worlds where anything is possible. It transcends age, gender, religion, race, or lifestyle–it is our way of believing what cannot be, delving into the unknowable, and discovering hidden truths about ourselves and our world in a brand new way. Fiction at its very best!

 

 

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Fitful Head by CJ Harter

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We’re going to take time out from the One Book Interview this week for another review.

I’ve done a couple of these in the past (Turner, The Rest Will Come, Hell Cat of the Holt and A Life Removed) and there are a few more books that I’m hoping to get reviews up for soon.

Before we get to the book, what’s it about?

Imagine you lose your mind… and something’s waiting to take its place.
Isobel Hickey’s husband, Richard, was intense, exciting and crazy, and she wants him back. The problem is she can’t have him: he died two years ago in circumstances too painful to remember. Now, she must keep going on for teenage children, Ben and Melissa, and her dog, Brodie. But how can she when nothing makes sense anymore? When she’s haunted by ghostly footprints in the snow, and a sinister stranger who knows too much about her?
When a mute old woman speaks from her death-bed, she plunges Isobel into terrifying danger, a nightmare chain of frightening events where Richard’s secrets lurk and threaten Isobel’s sanity. Now she has to fight to save her children from an insidious evil she doesn’t understand. She must uncover who, or what, is haunting her. But is she strong enough or will she succumb to its malevolent desire?

My thoughts about Fitful Head?

There are a lot of things to like about this book, but I struggled in places.

The things that stood out for me.

  • The opening section is great. The short punchy sentences work really well and are used to great effect here and in other similar passages throughout the book.
  • The prose is well written.
  • The cover suits the book perfectly.
  • The emotional fragility of the main character is nicely explored as the book progresses.
  • I liked not knowing what happened to the husband until the end. That added to the unease and suspense.

There were some things I wasn’t so keen on.

  • The timeline jumps around a lot. This was confusing at times and disrupted the flow of the text. Some of the flashbacks are preceded by a reference to set the scene up but I didn’t always catch them and had to keep checking back to work out what was going on.
  • Despite the main character’s emotional fragility being handled well, there were moments that I didn’t really understand why or what she was doing. The out of character behaviour may have been the point, but it didn’t always work well for me.
  • I wasn’t sure why some of the scenes were there – such as the events happening in the dog walking scenes. They make a little more sense towards the end of the book but while reading them they seemed unnecessary.
  • I would have preferred one POV throughout. As it is, there are only a few chapters which deviate from the main character and that change of perspective jarred.
  • The book is formatted as one long chapter, which makes flicking forwards and backwards hard.

All in all, Fitful Head is a slow read, a mix of a psychological thriller and a ghost story. It has a lot to recommend it  but I think it could have been so much better if it had been tightened up in places.

Three Stars.

If you want to read about the words behind the words, you can read an interview with the author here.

One Book Interview #26 – CJ Harter (Author)

 

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One Book Interview #45 – Ty Arthur (Author)

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Metalhead.

Gamer.

Author.

And now winner of the best answer to question one to date!

Good people of the Internet, writing out of Great Falls, Montana – Ty Arthur.

Name one book:

1 – everyone should read

This is a really subjective issue, since obviously not all readers are going to love the same style of writing or be interested in the same subject matter. I could say start off The Song Of Ice and Fire saga with first entry A Game Of Thrones, but not everyone wants to read about royal incest and the good guy getting his head chopped off because he wasn’t conniving enough (although those people would, of course, be wrong). I could recommend trying out Malazan or Wheel Of Time, but not everyone wants to get dragged through a never-ending mammoth fantasy series that becomes a marathon to finish. I could say that people should see where cosmic horror got its legs with Lovecraft or Chambers, but the dense style and off hand racism from another era would be off-putting to many modern readers. No matter what book I think is perfect, someone out there would be able to discover flaws or find it just doesn’t suit their tastes.

Rather than giving a specific title, I’d say the one book everyone needs to read is an indie book from a self-published author or someone on a small time publisher. While there are literary disasters out there to be avoided (that were rejected by all the publishers for very good reasons), I absolutely guarantee if you dive into the indie world you will find a book that’s leagues ahead of anything published by King, Jordan, Sanderson, and so on. Spend some time joining online groups of readers and writers in whatever genre you prefer, whether that’s urban fantasy, grimdark, sci-fi romance, or whatever, and you will find a book that you didn’t know you couldn’t live without.

2 – you would take with you if you were going to be marooned on Mars

When it comes to re-reading books, I find I usually only devour a fiction novel once or at most twice, but I really like diving back into RPG manuals again and again, especially if they are heavy on the story fluff (as opposed to the mechanics crunch) and marry their substance with a distinctive style. If I could only read one book over and over again while stuck on Mars, it would have to be something that was visually interesting and had themes I wanted to keep going back to, so I’d probably pick something like Earthdawn, Warhammer 40: Dark Heresy, or perhaps one of the many Call Of Cthulhu tabletop RPG iterations.

3 – you took a chance on and were pleasantly surprised by

Back in high school years ago, I picked up The Gathering Dark by Jeff Grubb, which is a tale of a magician’s apprentice trying to stay alive during Dominaria’s Ice Age when a powerful religious group is busy persecuting wizards. To be blunt, novels based on game franchises like Magic The Gathering or Forgotten Realms are often terrible, so that was a gamble. The book has always stuck with me over the years though, both for its interesting commentary on real world groups, and for its usage of game mechanics to bring scenes to life. A segment where wizards of various colors are trying to vex each other in entertaining ways at a fest hall – like reanimating the chicken through necromancy – has always stayed with me as a great example of how to use a setting’s quirks to your advantage.

4 – you’ve written that is your favourite

My fiction, whether short stories for anthologies or stand alone novels, is always based on a personal experience that gets translated into a fictional medium like horror, sci-fi, fantasy, etc. Almost universally, its the negative experiences that provide the most drive to write, so honestly I couldn’t say that any of the books I’ve written are my “favorite” in the sense that I actually enjoyed them.

If I had to pick one of these vile, misbegotten bastards though, I’d probably have to go with my short story A Church Full Of Lovers, which features an atheist, an agnostic, and a true believer all experiencing a terrible apocalypse together. It was the first short I actually put serious effort into and intended other people to read, and it has a revolving perspective mechanic that makes it quite different from many of my other releases.

The anthology that A Church Full Of Lovers eventually landed in is no longer available, but a revamped version of the story will be making an appearance in an upcoming release that goes a direction readers may not be expecting.

5 – that has influenced you most as a person

There are a lot of books I could list here that had big impacts on me, from Seyonne’s tale of being relentlessly downtrodden in Carl Berg’s Transformation, to the surprising revelations and genre mixing in C.S. Friedman’s Black Sun Rising, to the unforgettable portrayal of the devil and his motivations in Anne Rice’s Memnoch The Devil. The collision of punny humor with fantasy storytelling in the Xanth series also played a big role in crafting my early years.

Going back the farthest though, I’d have to say the book that influenced me most as a person was Redwall, as that was probably the book that most ignited my imagination and made me fall in love with fiction in general and fantasy in particular as a kid. I think its safe to say I wouldn’t be a roleplayer, an author, or an all around geek today if it weren’t for those books. That love really got a surprise re-ignition with the Mouse Guard: Fall 1152 graphic novel when I discovered it out of the blue at my local library years ago, and I highly recommend it to anyone of any age.

6 – that has influenced you most as a professional

Although I don’t try to emulate his writing style at all, a book that strongly influenced me as an author would have to be Clive Barker’s Weaveworld. The mashup of fantasy with horror in a modern day setting showed me that you don’t always have to color within the genre lines, and there’s plenty of room for characters and themes from one genre to land in another.

7 – of yours that prospective readers should start with if they want to get to know your work and where they can get it.

The place to start with me is definitely my grimdark fantasy / cosmic horror mashup Light Dawning that released back in May. Its a story that turns the standard fantasy tropes on their heads, so don’t go in expecting to meet any chosen one farm boys, brash rogues that evade the authorities and get the girl, or wise old wizards who will help the underdogs save the world.

Most of my other work is currently unavailable or about to become unavailable as contracts with publishers end and I re-launch as an indie self-published author. Those stories are all getting ready to be released again with new covers in the near future.

You can find Ty at www.tyarthur.wordpress.com

Ty Arthur has the good fortune to meld his passions and hobbies with his work while freelancing for the likes of Metalunderground, GameSkinny, and WorldStart.

He’s been busy writing a variety of gaming, heavy metal, and tech-themed columns since 2008.

Following a string of anthology appearances, Arthur’s debut standalone sci-fi / horror novella “Empty” was released in early 2016, with many more dark tales still to come.

 

Arthur writes to exorcise his demons and lives in the cold, dark north with his amazing wife Megan and infant son Gannicus Picard.

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One Book Interview #44 – JR Rice (Author)

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I read Dracula when I was about fourteen years old. I did it in one sitting because I wanted to know how it ended before I tried to sleep.

I have a feeling that if I read author 44’s books, I’d need to do the same thing.

(Or at least read them in a country where the sun never sets.)

Good people of the Internet, writing on an island, near a dark forest, by moonlight – J.R. Rice.

Name one book:

1 – everyone should read

I Am Legend by Richard Matheson.

First published in 1954, it was a novel ahead of its time. I consider it the patriarch of all vampire/zombie/end-of-the-world apocalyptic novels. Famed writer/director George A. Romero claimed Matheson’s novel was his primary inspiration for his 1968 film “Night of the Living Dead.”

2 – you would take with you if you were going to be marooned on Mars

Spacecraft Repair for Dummies by Jerry Rigg.

Alternatively, if that doesn’t work out:

Zen and the Art of Whiskey Making by Glen Livet

All lame attempts at humor aside, I would have to go with Stephen King’s “It” for content, length, and re-readability factor.

3 – you took a chance on and were pleasantly surprised by

The Teachings of Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge by Carlos Castaneda.

It was first published in 1968 by the Berkley: University of California Press as a work of anthropology, and submitted as the author’s Master’s thesis, although many people—including myself—contend that it is mostly a work of fiction.

The story documents the events that took place during an apprenticeship—by the author—with a self-proclaimed Yaqui Indian Sorcerer, don Juan Matus from Sonora, Mexico between 1960 and 1965.

It’s a fascinating and moving blend of fact and fiction with regard for Nagualism, and other Native American/Mesoamerican folklore.

4 – you’ve written that is your favourite

I’m a new writer, so I’ve only written two novels. The second book in my Bane County Series “Bane County: Returning Moon” is my favorite, so far.

5 – that has influenced you most as a person

It would be a toss-up between Brave New World by Aldous Huxley and 1984 by George Orwell.

6 – that has influenced you most as a professional

I would say that the writing style of Michael Crichton in novels such as “Jurassic Park” influenced me most. Crichton’s seamless blend of science fact and science fiction make your “suspension of disbelief” almost unnecessary.

7 – of yours that prospective readers should start with if they want to get to know your work and where they can get it.

The first book in my Bane County Series is “Bane County: Forgotten Moon.” Readers should start there.

You can find JR here.

J R Rice is the author and creator of Bane County: a horror/suspense/thriller series.

Book One and Two of the Series are available now:

Bane County: Forgotten Moon (Book 1)

Bane County: Returning Moon (Book 2)

Book Three is currently underway:

Bane County: First Moon (Book 3)

 

An Active Member of the Horror Writers Association, he lives on a large island, near the edge of a dark forest, with his beautiful wife, unruly children, dogs that he loves and cats that he tolerates, and one very nasty monster who lives under his bed and never shuts up.

He enjoys interacting with readers, so please feel free to join him at:

www.Facebook.com/JRRiceAuthor

(Fan page) Facebook.com/jrricefanpage

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