Meet Sprague Deacon – one of the toughest old-time hockey players who ever skated upon a rink of hand-poured ice. Sprague was born and raised and he expects to die here on the Northern Labrador coast. What he did not expect was a tour bus full of vampires – none of whom glitter in the least bit – to pull into his town and begin lowering the population level – one corpse at a time. Sprague and his three best friends – an over-the-hill never-say quit bush league hockey team from Northern Labrador go toe-to-tooth with a tour bus full of vampires in an immortal-stakes showdown of street hockey?

 

Sudden Death Overtime is fun, cinematic and the characters are engaging and quirkily slanted. Very much embracing the movie of this story in his head, Vernon writes in tight, visual scenes, and doesn’t skimp on the dialogue; you could easily imagine watching the story unfold on a big screen. His tale of vampires invading an iced-in Canadian town has overtures of 30 Days of Night about it, and his very unromantic antagonists are as eerie as they are vicious, just as they are in Niles’ vision. His geezer protagonists are affectionately drawn, and their language is authentic to the imagined ear, if a little inconsistent at times. The plot is straightforward, but this is a pulpy kind of tale anyway, so that’s not as big a problem as it could be.

The problem with this story is that I didn’t feel it was a finished draft. The writer has been indulged in the way he relishes his characters, and the fat that should have been trimmed with vigorous editing drags on the whole and makes it hard to read at times. Excessive dialogue tags, a confused sense of focalisation for the main character, the excess of similes and moments when the story is sacrificed in favour of fairly limp gags are all issues the editorial team at Crossroad Press should have addressed and challenged. From a well paced first half, the story progresses into its second and third acts with breaks in narrative logic, and over time the sense of Labrador as a living, populated place is lost. The hockey schtick is rather flat, and while Vernon asserts you don’t need to be a fan to appreciate it, I found it difficult to give credence to. More than anything, the pacing of the story in the second half is uneven.

This is a good story, and would make a great movie, but I didn’t feel it was completely ready for me to read yet.

Note: review copy received from the author

Yes, this is the single greatest book cover you've ever seen, but don't rip your now useless eyes out just yet...

Miriam Black knows when you will die.

Still in her early twenties, she’s foreseen hundreds of car crashes, heart attacks, strokes, suicides, and slow deaths by cancer. But when Miriam hitches a ride with truck driver Louis Darling and shakes his hand, she sees that in thirty days Louis will be gruesomely murdered while he calls her name.

Miriam has given up trying to save people; that only makes their deaths happen. But Louis will die because he met her, and she will be the next victim. No matter what she does she can’t save Louis. But if she wants to stay alive, she’ll have to try.

Chuck Wendig is a funny guy. If you follow him online, read his advice to writers or line up to be punch-lined by his twitter feed, you know he’s a funny guy. And in Blackbirds, as he introduces you to Miriam Black, heroine of the new series of horror-noir novels that bear her name, the balance between razor-blade drama and gallows humour is incredibly satisfying. But it’s a ruse, a seduction, leading you into somewhere much darker. Somewhere unrelentingly black.

By now you’ve probably read enough reviews to understand the premise; Miriam Black sees your death when she touches you, and she’s grifting her way across dustbowl USA plying a con that’s actually the real deal. It’s a nice twist on the hustler story from the get-go, and the aimlessness of her hustler life is elegantly and economically established early on. From here, her random encounter with a man who’ll die with her name on his lips leads her into collisions, rather than meetings or encounters, with the blackest, starkest bunch of psychopaths I’ve read in a long time. Other reviewers have repeatedly highlighted the harsh language, the unforgiving way the violence is written, the barren world Miriam has trapped herself in, and these are truthful observations. I said from the beginning that the charming anti-heroine routine only leads to somewhere really dark; Miriam’s early self-possession is systematically attacked by events, to the point where you’re genuinely convinced that hope is the disease that you yourself will die of. Black by name…

So for most, a taste for black is probably what will bring you to this book, and your dislike of it will likely turn you away. The latter choice, however, would be a shame, because this is an exceptional book. Written in spare, edged language, it is a masterclass in control. The tags of profanity and gore – and Wendig’s own humorous persona – might suggest a book that is more pulpy than this one is, one that relishes its own cool. In fact, this is an extraordinarily personal book, voiced from a place of real dread and delivered in a style and at a pace that you just can’t teach; Wendig was born to do this. The lean prose does not lack for startling imagery, or beautifully detailed focus, and the swearing and violence aren’t hip; they’re never anything but truthful to the horror of the situation Miriam is in. Structurally brilliant, the plot never releases you, and the switch-ups and beats are near flawless. It doesn’t race, or didn’t for me; it was too visceral for that kind of speed. Rather, this is a book that puts a very strong arm around your shuddering shoulders, and escorts you down a dark alley without room for argument.

Will you die there? I know a lady who knows. And I absolutely loved her.

Pirated ebooks came up for discussion again this morning when Lawrence Pearce, author of Hikikomori—a really chilling, indulgent ghost story, and one of my favourite reads of 2011—discovered that his book was on a torrent site. His reactions were conflicted.

In a way I’m pleased it’s finding some reach, as marketing on Hikikomori was non-existent. But at the same time, I remember how pirating hurt the sales of my film Night Junkies a few years back.

Pearce—formerly a film director, now writing full-time—finds himself in an odd spotlight: his film work had already attracted a considerable fan-base to the man, but his writing (Hikikomori was his debut, his first full novel is coming soon) is less well-known. He could convert some percentage of his previous fan-base to new readership, and probably has, but that’s a very narrow approach to getting his work under people’s noses.

He—like me—needs to be read to be valued, and value is the key term here. The reason new authors don’t just give their first works away for free is that, as much as you might think that would bring instant recognition, people don’t respond to it psychologically. The worthless object is never picked up. So you must invest worth in order to generate value.

The problem for writers is that, unlike musicians selling birds in cages, you’re trying to sell someone a pig in a poke.

Consider that idea: Come and buy my pig. In this bag.

Can I see the pig?

No. It’s a surprise.

You mean it’s a cat.

NO! It’s a great pig, a fat pig. Mmmm, bacon.

It’s a cat.

It is not a cat.

Then let me see it.

Here, you can see its left ear. See? Pink.

A cat’s ear is pink inside too.

IT’S NOT A CAT! NOT EVERYTHING ON THE INTERNET IS A CAT!

Now, consider later:

YOUR PIG! OMG! BACON-Y GOODNESS!

But—

I would like to buy a pig please.

You said it was a cat earlier.

I know, but then I had a bacon sandwich and, man, I was literally eating my words. See what I did there?

Where’d you get the bacon?

Huh?

Where did you get the bacon?

Uh…a mate. Big fan. Eats all the bacon.

OMG YOU STOLE ONE OF MY PIGS IN A POKE!

Shhhh! Okay, yes, but it was delicious and now I want to buy another, so I can leave the bag draped over my table at home and all my friends will say, ooh, you eat pig! Fancy! And I’ll say, oh yes, that’s gourmet pig that is, I have exquisite taste in bacon. I’ll send them all to you for their pigs.

Bullshit! You’ll give them my bacon for free, and show them the ridiculously large hole in my tent that would allow literally anyone to lift a bag and walk off with it and I’d never be the wiser. You’re a thief, a naughty, naughty thief and I will now drop this brick on you.

OW! Wanker! Fine. Shove your pig. Frankly, it tastes like cat.

For the writer seeking to establish themselves with a readership, piracy is a gift. It’s giving away for free a box people have already convinced themselves has something of value in it without even looking inside. But even for the established, successful writer, the rule of fandom applies. Neil Gaiman, whose piracy must be enormous, has a well worn refrain about the illegitimate distribution of his work,

the enemy of writers is not piracy or letting your stuff out for nothing, it’s obscurity.

And he speaks from his own experience of making American Gods free to download, ten years after its initial release, and seeing sales of the book go up by 300%.

Fandom is reliable; it will support its rockstars. But that image is actually a misleading one for a writer. New or well-established, writers are not rockstars. No one will hear all of your song on the radio and decide to steal it and everything you ever do. You sell pigs in pokes, and only word of your bacon-y goodness will keep you butchering. Even if there are people who never buy a single copy of your work legitimately, they’re still doing you a solid. Even if they never say a good word about you, the wordless demand is just as good. They’re no different to all those reviewers you’re already courting—no, I tell a lie; they’re better.

Because only a thief knows the real value of a thing, if they want it so much they’d be willing to steal to get it.

Podcasts! Huzzah!

I got clued into a site called Audioboo (Boo! How much do I love that?) this week and have moved to put two of the stories from Season of the Macabre up there for you to enjoy. However, I know how bone idle you are as well, so I’ve also embedded them here for your convenience.

Don’t be expecting anything for Christmas now, though.

The morning post brings the new paperbacks.

They stalk in, shedding their packaging before they’ve even crossed the hall, and stretch themselves all over the leather, basking in the sun like so many literary cats.

Sexy on the outside; evil on the inside.

I think I’m in love.