Month: September 2011

Time for the rewrite!

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New update, ladies and gents…
Time for the editing and rewriting process, so I’ll be as busy as a one-legged man in an arse-kicking competition for the next month or so.
After all I have learnt through the course this year, I need to add a lot to Hammered, so it may be a little behind with the release date.
I can promise it will be worth it, though.
I’ll keep you all updated as I go!
GNB

Some great auction bargains

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Some of the great items up for auction at the joint Australian American Association/Australian Horror Writers Association fund-raising dinner-dance and auction.
Fill list and reserve prices (HERE) and details of the bidding process for those unable to attend (HERE) are on the AHWA website .

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Just After Sunset – US first hardcover edition, donated and signed by Stephen King.

Stephen King–who has written more than fifty books, dozens of number one New York Times best-sellers, and many unforgettable movies–delivers an astonishing collection of short stories, his first since Everything’s Eventual six years ago. As guest editor of the bestselling Best American Short Stories 2007, King spent over a year reading hundreds of stories. His renewed passion for the form is evident on every page of Just After Sunset. The stories in this collection have appeared in The New Yorker, Playboy, McSweeney’s, The Paris Review, Esquire, and other publications.
     Who but Stephen King would turn a Port-O-San into a slimy birth canal, or a roadside honky-tonk into a place for endless love? A book salesman with a grievance might pick up a mute hitchhiker, not knowing the silent man in the passenger seat listens altogether too well. Or an exercise routine on a stationary bicycle, begun to reduce bad cholesterol, might take its rider on a captivating–and then terrifying–journey. Set on a remote key in Florida, “The Gingerbread Girl” is a riveting tale featuring a young woman as vulnerable–and resourceful–as Audrey Hepburn’s character in Wait Until Dark. In “Ayana,” a blind girl works a miracle with a kiss and the touch of her hand. For King, the line between the living and the dead is often blurry, and the seams that hold our reality intact might tear apart at any moment. In one of the longer stories here, “N.,” which recently broke new ground when it was adapted as a graphic digital entertainment, a psychiatric patient’s irrational thinking might create an apocalyptic threat in the Maine countryside . . . or keep the world from falling victim to it.
     Just After Sunset–call it dusk, call it twilight, it’s a time when human intercourse takes on an unnatural cast, when nothing is quite as it appears, when the imagination begins to reach for shadows as they dissipate to darkness and living daylight can be scared right out of you. It’s the perfect time for Stephen King.
Signed by Stephen King.

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This original illustration, “The Inquisitors”, by horror artist Greg Chapman, depicts the renowned witch-hunters Jacob Sprenger and Heinrich Kramer – authors of the infamous Malleus Maleficarum – and the Witch-Finder General Matthew Hopkins.
All three men appear in the forthcoming McFarland graphic novel Witches!, written by Rocky Wood and Lisa Morton, and illustrated by Greg Chapman.
The piece has been personally signed by the artist.

This full-colour piece is fairly self-explanatory!
Also signed by the artist.
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http://www.amazon.com/Stephen-King-Companion-Mcfarland-Companions/dp/078645850X/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1303182768&sr=1-1

This companion provides a two-part introduction to best-selling author Stephen King, whose enormous popularity over the years has gained him an audience well beyond readers of horror fiction, the genre with which is most often associated. Part I considers the reception of King’s work, the film adaptations that they gave rise to, the fictional worlds in which some of his novels are set, and the more useful approaches to King’s varied corpus. Part II consists of entries for each series, novel, story, screenplay and even poem, including works never published or produced, as well as characters and settings.
Signed by Rocky, and dedicated to the winning bidder!

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http://www.mcfarlandpub.com/book-2.php?id=978-0-7864-4563-9

That notorious evening at Villa Diodati when Lord Byron challenged his contemporaries to write a ghost story, his summons brought forth a mad doctor intent on reanimation and a vampire drunk with bloodlust. The night modern horror was born was notoriously dark and stormy, as were the lives of those who wrote the most fearsome–yet beloved–tales in literature, for those so gifted were also cursed. Horrors, a graphic novel, reveals in gruesome detail how Mary Wollstonecraft, Bram Stoker, Edgar Allan Poe and other masters of the genre were haunted by their monstrous creations.

Signed by Rocky, and dedicated to the winning bidder!

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Sterling Silver pendant, with a doublet Opal, valued at $300, kindly donated by AAA member Nick Le Souef from Lightning Ridge Opal Mines.

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To be held on the 29th October in Melbourne – details are on the flyer below.

REVIEW: The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern (proof)

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The Night Circus
By Erin Morgenstern

ISBN: 9781846555244
Format: Trade Paperback
Imprint: Harvill/Secker
Published: 3rdOctober 2011

In 1886, a mysterious travelling circus becomes an international sensation. Open only at night, constructed entirely in black and white, the Cirque des Rêves delights all who wander its circular paths and warm themselves at its bonfire. There are contortionists, performing cats, carousels and illusionists – all the trappings of an ordinary circus. But this is no conventional spectacle. Some tents contain clouds, some ice. The circus seems almost to cast a spell over its aficionados, who call themselves the rêveurs – the dreamers. And who is the sinister man in the grey suit who watches over it all? Behind the scenes, a dangerous game is being played out by two young magicians, Celia and Marco, who, at the behest of their masters, are forced to test the very limits of the imagination – and of love.

REVIEW:
‘The circus arrives without warning. No announcements precede it. It is simply there, when yesterday it was not.’
Since Twilight brought the romance back to fiction in the literary scene there has been an explosion of ‘paranormal romance’ that seems to want to profit from Stephanie Meyer’s success.
From Vampire Academy to True Blood, from sexy vampires to sexy werewolves, the genre has been flooded with ‘TwiHards’. Now, along comes the real thing.
The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern is a tapestry of brilliant threads, woven together into something that seems somehow more than the sum of its parts.
The language itself is sublime, more literate than most, but the book’s true beauty lies deep within the narrative. The way the descriptives tie together, the way the writer draws you in and creates visuals unlike any other book; the way the circus becomes as much a character as any other within the story; the hauntingly beautiful prose: all these facets combine to create a feast for the senses that transcends the normal reading experience.
To look at this book purely as something to read is to do it a disservice. It needs to be approached from an experiential perspective, for it truly is more an experience than just a book.
Within the pages of The Night Circus, Morgenstern has created a mythos, a new world for readers to inhabit, and a tragically flawed love that is written without the angst so prevalent in most of today’s offerings. Her writing style is literate, while still accessible; captivating, while still easy-to-read. While it is unlikely to create a fan-base as rabid as Twilight managed after four books, it will surely win over many, many readers.
If you read this with expectations of something ordinary, you will be delighted, and if you expect something great, you will still be pleasantly surprised.
A resounding eight out of ten for this wonderful new talent.
Geoff Brown

The Night Circus will be available from Dymocks Bendigo, and all good bookstores, from the third of October 2011. Thanks to Dymocks for the review copy.

Updates for September

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I’ve been busy lately with Australian Horror Writers Association stuff, as well as assessment tasks for TAFE college. Hammered is still on the go for a late October/early November release, with an accompanying launch/signing at Dymocks bookshop in Southland, Melbourne. There will also be two regional launches; Gippsland at the Inverloch Community House and Bendigo (dates TBA for both).
For now, I’m waiting on the first run of structural and mechanical edits. I’ll keep you all updated as I know more.

For now, I encourage any Australian, New Zealand or Oceania writers to submit works published in 2011 (novel, novella, edited publication, collection or short story) for the Australian Shadows Awards.

GNB