FREE Graven Image...

Kindle people, I have a seasonal gift for you. for the next five days, my novella GRAVEN IMAGE is going for $0.00 at Amazon UK. I believe it is also $0.00 at Amazon US.

Please download it at no cost to you and help push it up the charts. This is the one that starts with the line "I was in the abbey when I realised I'd have to burn for my sins."

Remember, this is an offer ends on Jan 3rd.

Some Kindle Picks

Hey, I have a new Kindle too... but I have had mine a couple of months now and I've had a chance to check some stuff out. Two novels you should get immediately are THE BASTARD HAND by Heath Lowrance and BEAUTIFUL, NAKED & DEAD by Josh Stallings. These two get talked about a lot and for good reason. One is noir as hell, the other hard-boiled as a bastard.

I can't (be arsed to) fit everything in this one post but you should also finally check out offerings from Allan Guthrie, Ray Banks and Anthony Neil Smith - all rollercoaster-ish, rooted in place and pretty near the money in terms of where the genre is at.

One I have picked up but not yet read is David Belbin's BONE AND CANE - this has sold shitloads on Kindle and keeps coming back - what is it all about? I am about to find out.

Feeling cheap? There are some top freebies out there. TURTLE BOY is a horror novella by Kealan Patrick Burke that is as weird as it sounds... and also great.

You can get the classics for diddly squat too - HEART OF DARKNESS, FRANKENSTEIN, DORIAN GRAY... My own favourite is one called DRACULA by some dude called Bram Stoker. It's about this dead guy who is sort of alive, and he drinks people's blood and travels around a lot. Sounds ridiculous, but I reckon it'll break through one day. And hey, Mr. Stoker is kind enough to offer it for free!

Happy Kindle-ing. Or Nook-ing, or whatever.

One Dead Hen goes cheap

The nice people at Amazon.com have made my most recent book ONE DEAD HEN available for just five bucks between now and Dec 31. This is for the actual hold-it-in-your-hands, spill-your-beer-on-it, throw-it-across-the-room paper version (that has just made Paul D. Brazill's top 5 of the year list*). Also for $5 is KING OF THE ROAD, the previous one in the Royston Blake series. I say series, but these books are standalone, so you can go straight in at either of these two.

PLEASE BEWARE OF THESE BOOKS if you

1. take everything at face value
2. have no sense of humour
3. are a smug, narrow-minded prude

But you can't be any of those things, because you're reading this blog.

In the latest customer review of One Dead Hen, "anomalie" says:

This is not for the PC crowd, and perhaps that's what makes it so funny. Anyway, if you liked the first ones, you should like this one too. Blake is a true anti-hero, and while the novel asks if someone can truly 'turn over a new leaf,' Williams seems to have a lot of fun proving that Blake may have some new duds but it's the same old Blake underneath.

And hey, I'd never leave out those in the UK. King of the Road is currently going for only £3.15. This is the one that the Dublin Evening Herald called "a heady literary mix between Straw Dogs and Pulp Fiction", the Times called "a great mystery" and the Big Issue called "a sharp and bitingly funny novel". I call it bargain.

* Big thanks to PDB

Spammers from India...

Get lost.

Spammers from anywhere for that matter. Stop posting meaningless comments on this blog that I then have to go to the effort of removing. But you're not going to, are you? I predict that you will come on here in a day or so, like you always do, and write "Nice post". Come on, surprise me. Say something human. What is it like where you live? What did you have for dinner? How many hours a day do you spend spamming? How much money do you make from it? Who are you? What do you want out of life? What is the meaning of life? Why are we here?

Branded

Last night I wrote THE END on a novel. This is the second time in a year, which seems like pretty good going by today's non pulp era standards. Then again, I am doing this full time at the moment (alongside a couple of other writing bits and bobs), so it's as it should be. FYI, this new one is a stand alone called THE DAMAGE. It is noir. It seems like psycho noir to me, although I have yet to hear a definition of that term.

Looking back at timestamps, I can see that I first started this novel way back in August of 2009. Not that it has taken two years to write. Fact is, I abandoned the thing at least twice over that period, starting it over each time I picked it up again. And this is nothing unusual - my hard drive is a veritable graveyard of novels abandoned at various stages, going right back to when I started writing. But this one kept bugging me, whispering to me that I really should come back to it because there is some kind of gold in there. And each time I went back to it, I would get bogged down with the same set of problems. Then, the last time I picked it up, I did something new.

I changed the title.

Sounds like not much, but it altered the whole thing. I just had the wrong title before, and every time I thought of the work, that title came into my head and it was wrong, just wrong. As soon as I called it The Damage, things started coming clear. I could see what to chuck out and what to focus on, and had faith that I could find the path to the conclusion. Which is funny, because a lot of writers don't even have a title until after a work is done. Maybe that's it - I should just think of every work in progress as "Untitled". But that doesn't seem right either. To me, the title is hardwired into a novel. You are reminded of it every time you open the manuscript, and although you don't make any effort to justify the title in the text, the two become fused. The title is branded on the novel's butt cheek.

It feels good to finish a book that I've been tussling with for so long. I feel slightly saner today. Less psycho noir.

Swearing 4

Interesting comment on Amazon re ONE DEAD HEN, from the renowned critic known as Quiverbow:

"Most crime/thrillers/mystery books have swear words. However, those are done in an appropriate way. This book is using them here for the sake of it. That suggests he can't think of anything to write, so has to resort to utilising those words to fill the pages."

So there you have it - I put the swear words in my books because I can't think of anything else to write. I wrote the book, found myself 5,000 words short so I just padded it out with a load of fucks etc. As we all know, any mention of animals in books is also just padding. Short on the word count? Just chuck a few animals in. Also dialogue - that is a surefire sign of an author with nothing to say. And characterisation - what the hell is that? Why can't they just tell the story instead of messing around with these characters? Plus the big daddy of text padding - "that". Any book that contains more than 100 "that"s is a waste of anyone's time.

Just sayin'

GRAVEN IMAGE is now available to buy as an ebook from Goodreads, so you can get it for Kobo, Nook and the other readers as well as the Kindle. These ebook readers are pretty crazy, aren't they? But sexy.

The Bastard Hand

I don't think I've ever read a book like The Bastard Hand by Heath Lowrance. It has all the attitude and boundary-pushing of classic pulp and a big shitload of weird to boot. In short, it has all the stuff I love to read. But having the correct ingredients does not necessarily a great cake make, mate. However, in this case it does.

The Bastard Hand is a very great cake indeed.

I won't jack around trying to summarise the plot (because you can get it via the link above - and buy it while you're there), all you need to know is that there is madness here. There is also degeneracy, betrayal, evil and trying to resist evil, religion, carnality and guns. It might just be me, but some of it didn't make 100% sense. But do you know what? Those bits are the best. A book doesn't need to make 100% sense, and in fact should try not to. That sliver of mystery, carefully marshalled, can turn a functional page-turner into something you obsess over while reading. The other thing The Bastard Hand contains a lot of is alcohol. I love books with drunkenness in them, and Lowrance does that well. Anyone would think he has been drunk before.

Knocking around books and publishing for a few years, you start to get a feel for what publishers want (ie, what they think readers will buy). Most of the time, this kind of book is not it. The original, the don't-give-a-fuck, the beautifully crafted and in places visionary - it all gets cast aside in favour of the bland shite that fills our bookshops these days. But, Jesus Christ, do we ever need this. We need a whole fucking movement of this kind of stuff, Heath Lowrance pushed up to the vanguard and roaring on the troops. (OK with you, Heath?)

Aggro Blakey

Please ignore Royston Blake's aggressive sales technique. He will not really escape from Mangel and track you down. When push comes to shove, I think we all know that escaping from Mangel is beyond him. And so is effective, considerate promotion of the books he calls his own. So, you are welcome to peruse his chronicles and procure one or two if you wish, but there is no implied threat of violence if you don't. I can't confirm that he won't get Nathan the barman to perform some kind of magic ritual against you, though.

Guest blog: Royston Blake

Dear bastards,

It has come to my wossname that not enough of you is buying my books, either in the non-Mangel parts of Britain or in America, which is famous for being where Rocky comes from. And that can only mean one thing, far as my thinking goes: you ain't got enough love for old Blakey.

Now, there's two things I can do here. Number one, I can try and make meself more popular. In my experience, the one surefire way to get your arse right to the top of the popular tree is to get a job as a doorman. Failing that, bouncer. There's some cunts who don't like members of the dooring and bouncing communities, but that's because they'm jealous. Or they had their arses kicked out of a couple of places and they got a grudge against the brethren. But them sort is worth shite and ain't even worthy of being used to wipe my arse with. What counts is the decent folks out there - the birds who like to feel my biceps and the fellers who crash us fags and don't cause too much trouble, unless it's out on the street where I can have a laugh. And I'm figuring you're in that camp, and that you'll respond by shelling out for a couple of my books if I don the doorman regalia once again. So that's one way we could go.

The other way, I come out into the world beyond Mangel and crack some fucking Outsider swedes.

Up to you.

Your mate,

Blakey

Goodies

Got lasagne in the oven, beer in the fridge, books to read and films to watch. And hey, I got a couple of things for you too!

Have you read ONE DEAD HEN, Royston Blake's latest fouth-mouthed hurrah? No? Well you can check out a big sample of it FOR FREE to see if you like it or not. I just had a quick look myself and found it too sweary for my tastes. Really, why do these writers have to swear so much? Do they think they are impressing someone?

Goodie number two is this guest blog of mine on Heath Lowrance's PSYCHO NOIR blog. Is there a better-named blog in the blogosphere? If I owned a bar it would be called Psycho Noir. If I had a school I would call it Psycho Noir.

Looking back, I can see that these two goodies don't really stack up next to beer and lasagne. But hey, the beer is only Tetleys, which is very far from being a favourite of mine. And I'm probably going to burn the lasagne. All in all we're pretty even.

Many thanks to Heath for inviting me to do the guest post, and putting the idea of Psycho Noir Elementary School into my head.

GRAVEN IMAGE for Kindle

Hey Kindle bods, you can now get my noir novella GRAVEN IMAGE for your device. Not only that, but it is FILTHY CHEAP. We are talking 86p in the UK and something similar in the US. Of course, the book is still available from Five Leaves Press as a beautiful paperback.

This is the one of which the Nerd of Noir declared:

"The Nerd urges you, dear reader, to get your hands on some Graven Image toot-fucking-sweet, to let Leon take you on a journey through both the dark alleys of his hometown and those of his diseased brain. Granted, Leon's gonna give you a laugh now and then, but mostly he's just making sure this intense crazy train never slows for a fucking second lest he get a horrifying moment to reflect."

Also, I'd be mighty grateful if those who have read it could consider doing some sort of Amazon review. Good or bad, so long as the thing looks like it is being read! And hey, you know I love you.