Snake Eyes by Joseph D’Lacey

The award-winning writer of that jaw-dropping horror book, Meat, has released two novellas in one book – ebook. Grab it today!

Snake Eyes by Joseph D’Lacey

Ebook and paperback

 

File Size: 552 KB

Print Length: 139 pages

Publisher: Crossroad Press & Bad Moon Books Digital Edition edition (April 12, 2012)

Sold by: Amazon Digital Services

Language: English

ASIN: B007TW8N60

ISBN-13: 978-0-9837799-7-1

If there is a New Wave science-horror-fiction sub-genre then Snake-Eyes would be its cutting edge. The reader is treated to a smorgasbord of hallucinatory ideas with a logical surprisingly sane spine. Joseph D’Lacey can write grisly horror as demonstrated in the acclaimed Meat novel but the tone, while horrific and nightmarish is more subtle. Robert Johnson is a family man, trying to be successful at his accountancy career, or is that his narcotics enforcer job, but then where has his family gone? Not to worry, they exist – in a fashion. Starting with giant spiders the arachnid theme travels either just behind or in front of Johnson through the tiers of his existence. Keeping with the spiders, this story is a web of ideas that will pull you along, screaming, puzzled but with an eventual resolution.

D’Lacey writes horror with a literary pen. I wish I’d thought of ‘a parting of minds’. He also is a master of sensory Show, using senses of smell and touch to excellent effect. Good to note too that his characters react to those sensory experiences.

Spoiler warning: I’ve read many generation ship stories, but none quite like this one. From Harry Harrison’s Captive Universe, Brian Aldis’ Non-Stop and many others are enjoyable takes on the theme and often you wonder how a contemporary writer can find a new angle. This story has. And for those collectors of zombie tales, this isn’t one. There are former humans that become animated known as revenants, but they learn to run after Johnson and we all know that zombies can’t run.

There’s a shorter bonus story bundled with Snake Eyes – A Trespasser in Long Lofting that explores what happens when a well-endowed demon crashlands in your neighbourhood. A tale of tremendous and lascivious fun.

update among other things

So much is happening: final proofreading ARIA; finding images and working with Kim McDougall of Blaziing Trailers, to create a video trailer for ARIA; working on final proof with Dave Haslett of ideas4writers of a 50 page booklet on how to win short story competitions; reading like mad for the Chestesr SF Book Group in the library today; and and and.

One of the pleasurable ‘ands’ is to mention Ben Bamber’s new novella, Super Red. It’s target is teen to adult readers of science fiction and thrillers with a message. Ben is philosphical and so his books and story make you think. Fair enough. Buy his Super Red from the link on the book’s page at http://www.vagabond-unlimited.co.uk/#!super-red Just imagine the sun going nova before it should. Suppose you have a year or so before the Earth becomes subsumed by the sun’s expansion. What would you do? Apocaluyptic and yet there is positive thinking in there too.

Review of Alternative Reality News Service: Luna for the Lunies.

Alternate Reality News Service, Luna for the Lunies by Ira Nayman

The third in the Alternate Reality News Service books, and in which this reviewer’s LOL muscles were exercised in at least 11 dimensions and two universes.

Published by CreateSpace, 2012   274 pages

ISBN: 978-1470053734 for paperback

http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/126271 for ebook of various formats.

Reviewed by Geoff Nelder

ARNS: Luna for the Lunies by Ira Nayman

In the spirit of alternate reality I am starting near the end. Bear in mind that this isn’t just a humorous book, it is absolutely hilarious in its own bizarro fashion. Each chapter is an alternate something. You might expect eco textbooks to have chapter headings as in this book such as Alternate Technology and Alternate Politics, but not an Alternate Glossary. How many other books have a glossary boasting that the words are NOT those you’d find in the book! Hilarious. One item to tickle your alternate eye might be – Parallelogramme (noun): a telegram from a parallel universe.

 

Between the ten chapters is a longer story – The Reality Threshold – which teases readers with insights into the manic workings of the Alternate Reality News Service office and its staff. I like this because one of the few problems with short story / article collections is the lack of a main character with whom the reader can connect. With this interwoven story we get to know Brenda Brundtland-Govanni, her six feet six height and pink sundress, and engage with her desires.

 

As fans of the earlier ARNS books would expect there are zany inventions and what-ifs that strangely are just an extension to the logic and practice of what happens already. So many times, I read something Nayman invents and think – so obvious, why hasn’t it already been done? Why haven’t I thought of it first? A few examples: a computer program that enacted via search engines trawls the world to erase everything about the target individual. Innocuous? Not in the hands of Ira Nayman – the holes in the internet grow… Then there are the alternate gadgets: the Teen Annoyance Reduction; Aural Confusinator; fridges that send messages not only to the authorities re: the unhealthy contents, but to fridges in other cities, for a natter.

 

As a climate aficionado and lover of stochastic phenomena, I am particularly fond of the international havoc caused by the discovery and attempts to capture in China (and sell) the individual butterfly whose effect will create a hurricane in the US.

 

There are many more incidents and phenomena in this book that challenge conventions, crease that smile and raise an eyebrow, but there is an academic piece that intrigued me. Theories on humour have interested me for years, as it has for philosophers, psychologists and comedians. Are all jokes based on someone’s misfortune as Bob Monkhouse claimed? So, my eyes pricked up when I read a reference to Aristotle, as I knew he had written on Comedy in his Poetics tomes. Did Ira Nayman elaborate on incongruity theory of comedy, superiority, or relief theories? Nearly. An intelligent argument explores why jokes lose their humour with time. He comes up with a formula: the half-life of a joke is proportionate to its relationship to popular culture. His exemplar is to quote a 2,300-year-old joke he found in one of Aristotle’s lost books on comedy. It isn’t funny anymore. Why? His ruminations take us into the latest science. No less than the Large Hadron Collider, which on smashing sub-atomic particles reveals an emission discovered to be humour. It degrades via black holes to another dimension. Hence some old jokes are no longer funny because their humour is rib-tickling people in another dimension, or a parallel universe. Makes sense to me. Or as Nayman has it, the universe has the last laugh. Just maybe not this universe.

 

There’s far more than I can mention in this review, such as when apostrophes go’’’’’’ berserk; and fly-through fast food outlets for witches leave pedestrians running for cover from litter falling at terminal velocity.

 

As always, Ira Nayman, crosses my reality threshold at 90 mph and leaves me laughing, thoughtful, inspired and enriched even if no wiser. I strongly recommend his Alternate Reality News Service to readers in all dimensions and universes.

 

Update on things

I am delighted to report that Robert Blevins of Adventure Books of Seattle is eager to publish  the third editions of Hot Air and Escaping Reality. I will let you know when they are ready.

LL-Publications have sent me the proof copy of ARIA: Left Luggage and I am going through it, making ammendments as the proofreader requested. Very handy to have American editors at this stage, pointing out that they don’t use terms like grog. There are also some minor plot continuity errors, which are now fixed. Amazing how these things slip through after being rewritten, redrafted, gone through a critique group and poured over. It will be published this summer and already some famous book reviewers have promised to read it. Waterstones in various towns have agreed to let me do signings. So much to do.

Grandchildren are growing up fast. Amy is talking more legibly and Oliver is making jokes. His dad told him to eat his carrots so he can see in the dark. What did Oliver say? Put the light on, daddy!

I’ve read an exhilirating bizarro – humorous SF book by Ira Nayman. The review is in the above blog. The one I haven’t written yet. See, I’m into alternate time zones.

The Respectable Face of Tyranny by Gary Fry

A review by Geoff Nelder of

The Respectable Face of Tyranny by Gary Fry

Spectral Visions Volume 1

Published by Spectral Press April 2012  website here

Suppose you are a recently divorced man with a typical teen daughter to bring up and protect. Stress enough for most ordinary people. Then add acute financial problems resulting in having to live in a caravan on a cliff top and you need fortitude. Into this mix your caravan is in the enigmatic landscape of Whitby, North Yorkshire, and you have more imagination than Roald Dahl seeing what might be hallucinations on the beach where the dinosaurs lived, and you too would wonder what life is all about.

Gary Fry has crafted a cunning tale here. No quotidian (his word of the month I think, and I like it) ghost or horror story but a recipe for madness, and yet a grasp for sanity as Josh sees symbols of his financial woes in the Jurassic landscape. This story, like others, by sheer coincidence – in the Spectral Press unique collection – have a personal resonance for me. I too have fossil hunted on Saltwick Bay, wondered about the disintegrating concrete boat from a World warring era, and smelt the metallic tang of pebbles but also the pungent nose-pinching odours of seaweed. I am a keen admirer of fiction that uses real geography and it is cleverly used here.

Praise be to the ammonite god that Whitby Abbey is used and yet no mention of Dracula is called for. Yeay – a first, surely. No vampire is needed to make this story stand out as a literary gem. A dwelling on life’s struggles in the static dwelling on the cliff – where strange electric flocks might be the children of the creatures of that coastline’s geological strata.

Who isn’t beset by financial problems in this global recession? If they lost you your marriage, home, and gave you new problems, how your mind would contort to find solutions. Yet, only in Gary Fry’s imagination has these elements combined – the ancient and the modern, past souls and contemporary life.

Thank you to Gary’s publisher, too for allowing font size changes to great effect. For example – On the beach    ‘… heard the sound return to him several times, on each

occasion quieter, quieter, quieter’

This is reminiscent of Walter Miller’s A Canticle For Leibowitz p83 where Brother Francis timidly speaks in a tiny font to the Lord Abbot, then when asked to speak up, blurts out in capitals. Hah. That was in 1960, and generally it’s been discouraged since and can look childish, but masterfully done here.

A theme in the story is on tattoos. Teenage Sally wants one, of course, and dad doesn’t want her too, of course. Cliché so far, but it develops in an undercurrent way, and I love the way she teased him. Also the tattooed man in Whitby Fair so reminded me of Bradbury’s The Illustrated Man, as does – in a good, ironic way – Gary Fry’s publisher himself: Simon Marshall-Jones. You are in this story, just as delectable.

This story isn’t to missed by those readers of the noir side to contemporary life, tainted by ghastly visions, supported by love. Cleverly done.

Any publishers out there?

The publisher of my humorous thriller, Escaping Reality, and Mediterranean thriller, Hot Air, has given up publishing. Not because sales are low, which they are but ironically picking up just recently. Brambling Books was a one man and his wife business, like many small presses. He’s had misfortunes in 2011 with family and friends dying in South Africa, NZ and Australia. Not only did he have businesses with them out there that need sorting out, but their deaths have hit him, emotionally, much harder than he expected.
We parted on good terms but it leaves me with the problem of finding a publisher. The difficulty is that both books have now been published by two small presses, and in the case of Escaping Reality, have almost certainly peaked its sales some 5 years or so ago. Again, ironically, my local independent bookshop, Bluecoat Books – in Chester, have just ordered 6 more from me on sale on return. If it wasn’t for those trickle sales I’d be tempted to go to an ebook-only publisher.  I am keen to get Hot Air into paper print because apart from 15 poorly printed copies from the original Dutch publisher, its never been available in print worldwide and I’ve been asked for it many times.
I could do self-publishing. However, I’ve never done that and I’m too busy reading, writing, reviewing, editing and cycling, etc to learn how. I need a publisher to take them on – not to spend a lot of money on them – I’ll do the promo, etc.
Later this year, a science fiction small press is publishing my ARIA vol one (Left Luggage) SF novel, and I’ve already got offers of signings at some Waterstones, so it would be good to have the other books available too.

I still like the ebook cover art for Hot Air and the paperback cover, but this is an opportunity to redo the Escaping Reality cover. I’ve always thought it was too much like a hard-nosed crime than a humorous thriller.
Any ideas gratefully received.

Late good news. Bluecoat Books, 1 City Wall, Chester has copies of Escaping Reality and Exit, Pursued by a Bee. Their website.