7 TERRIFIC ARTISTS

richardsreality.com has been expanded and brought up to speed, with new articles, a new story, a completely updated bibliography, discussion boards, and even an art gallery. Not my art! I can't so much as draw matchstick men ... or rather, they come out as matchstick mutants. No, these are the best covers for my books -- some of them wrap-arounds -- and illustrations accompanying my short fiction. Terrific artwork by Paul Lowe, Deirdre Counihan, Paul Mudie, David Bezzina (displayed, copyright (c) David Bezzina 2005), Wayne Miller, Sandro Castelli, and Keith Minnion.

PAGE 69

As I mentioned earlier, the site network Campaign for the American Reader recently ran its Page 69 Test on 'Dark Rain,' asking me to talk about that page and how it relates to the rest of the book. Only problem? Because of copyright laws, they couldn't reproduce the actual part that I was discussing. But I don't have that problem, so here it is, with the kind okay of Eos/HarperCollins:

The thing just took our heat, wincing with discomfort. And kept on pressing forward, trying to snatch the guns from both our hands. Its claws made a whistling noise, splitting the very air. We were the ones going backward by this time, and I didn’t like that. You can’t fight properly if you have to keep retreating.
It couldn’t disarm both of us if we separated. So I stepped sideways, behind my desk. Gun-smoke had already filled the room, my eyes were stinging gently. I was shaking slightly, wondering how to beat this thing.
The creature paused a moment, trying to decide which of us to follow. Its head went even lower, and its green eyes blinked. And then its shining gaze pinioned me. I’m not sure why. Cassie was the greater threat. But perhaps it had noticed that I still had the arrowhead in my left hand.
The beast suddenly lurched forward, ramming so hard into my desk it completely overturned it. My chair flipped over savagely, forcing me to jump back. I dodged across to one side, tried to fire again.
The hammer came down on an empty chamber. And the creature was stepping up onto my capsized desk by this time. I glanced desperately at Cass.
One of her slim eyebrows arched. She tossed me her second Glock. She uses the extended magazines, so she had plenty of shots to spare. The creature swiped at me with its long talons, missing me by barely an inch. I put three rounds straight into the center of its chest. It staggered back again, and let out something that I suppose might have been a moan. But then it just recovered, like the last time.
I could see there was no stopping it this way. We might as well be taking potshots at the side of a barn door. There was another handgun in the top drawer of my desk, a Magnum. Except my desk was lying on its side. And the creature had climbed on top of it once more.
I snatched up my fallen chair and hurled it at it, acting out of desperation. One of those huge arms simply batted it away.
Cass, though, had a clear run at the door by this time. I’d at least succeeded in drawing it away from her.
Copyright (c) Tony Richards 2008.

And here is what I wrote about it:

Page 69 of ‘Dark Rain’ -- my first full-length novel in over a decade, and hopefully the start of a whole series of them -- happens to be one of the most action-packed pages in the entire book. It falls right in the middle of the first action sequence, in fact. A vicious and hard-to-kill creature called the Dralleg -- the servant of an evil magician named Saruak -- has just materialized in the office of the book’s two heroes, Ross Devries and Cass Mallory. And they are desperately trying to fight it off, all weapons blazing.
If you like this kind of stuff, then it’s the perfect introduction. There is plenty more adventure and excitement in ‘Dark Rain,' culminating in a final battle on the rooftops above Union Square, and the book has variously been described as ‘fast and fun’ and ‘a one-sitting read.’
But if you’re of a more pensive nature, there’s no need to worry. What I’ve done in ‘Dark Rain,’ you see, is create a whole new imaginary town, Raine’s Landing, Massachusetts. It might look normal on the surface, but is actually a very strange place indeed. Because way back in the Sixteen Hundreds, the real witches of Salem fled there to escape the trials. They married into the local population, and the place has been imbued with magic -- some of it of the dark kind -- ever since.
And so I introduce the reader to the town, its different neighborhoods, its rich districts and poor ones. And there are some carefully-drawn portraits of its inhabitants too, ranging from more rational ones like Judge Samuel Levin to bizarre characters who’ve been driven insane to varying degrees by their own magic -- Dr. Lehman Willets and the manic Woodard Raine.
There’s something to enjoy on every level, in other words. The next book in the series -- ‘Night of Demons’ -- is due out next year.

AND WHEN I'M NOT READING?

I've just been to the 606 Club -- a subterranean, madly-crowded, hugely-atmospheric venue down by the river in Chelsea -- to see the award winning Anglo-Bengali pianist Zoe Rahman (pictured*). And she was just as superb as the last time I saw her, going at each piece with huge verve and seemingly effortless brilliance. If you're into jazz and haven't heard of her yet, check her out.

By the way, another network of sites -- a very good one called Campaign for the American Reader, dedicated to, well, getting folks in the U.S. to read more -- has been running an experiment for a while getting authors to talk about the sixty-ninth page of their latest novel. And the one up at the moment is 'Dark Rain.' I'll reprint it here once they're done with it.

WHAT I DO WHEN I'M NOT WRITING

'Night of Demons' is finally finished, which gives me at least a couple of weeks before my editor gets back. And I've already pointed out that I have plenty to do in that time. But one of the toughest aspects of being in the late stages of a novel is that you're not much inclined to read anybody else's. And curiously, I haven't read much horror in quite a while. I picked up a lot of those books, in the States. So my reading list from this point onward goes as follows:

Keepers -- Gary A. Braunbeck.

Nightwalker -- Jocelynn Drake.

The Deluge -- Mark Morris.

Rabid Growth -- James A. Moore.

The Scent of Shadows -- Vicki Petterson.

Tower Hill -- Sarah Pinborough.

Drake and Petterson are both fellow Eos authors, by the way. And then there's 'How to Make Monsters,' the new collection by Gary McMahon, one of my favourite new writers. And I must get around to reading one of Nancy Kilpatrick's vampire novels, which I understand are excellent.

GROOVY OLD MOVIES

* You might have noticed in my personal stuff a genuine fondness for old movies. And it goes like this:

That evening in late March, there was an unexpected cold snap. The streets of London glittered silver with hard frost, and you could practically write your name with your breath on the near-motionless air. That didn’t stop us going out. A brigade of special forces wouldn’t have stopped us going out. Less than three months till our finals, we both ought to have had our respective heads buried firmly in our textbooks, and ... to hell with it!
The Everyman cinema in Hampstead was running a triple-bill for one night only. Namely, three of the most wonderful stretches of monochrome celluloid ever to be projected onto any silver screen. King Vidor’s Gilda. Joseph Mankievicz’s All About Eve. And Howard Hawks’ To Have And Have Not, scripted by William Faulkner rather vaguely from the book by Ernest Hemingway, starring Humphrey Bogart, and introducing a skinny eighteen year old starlet by the name of Lauren Bacall.
We slithered our way there along the gleaming paving stones, bought coffees in the foyer to try and warm ourselves up, then sat there in our overcoats for practically six hours, almost the only people in the theatre on that daunting night, totally immersed in melodramas of such style and grace and power, all the cash and computer-imagery in modern Hollywood has never re-created the like.
And we just couldn’t stop babbling, on the slow journey home. Those fantastic, grandstanding first few minutes of voice-over monologue in Eve! That incredible exit up the stairway! That iconic first shot of Rita Hayworth, tossing back her hair! In which film did the camera worship her the more ardently -- the one we had just seen or Lady From Shanghai? Which was the better of the two, To Have or Casablanca? Hell, they both had the same plot! And was that Bacall doing her own singing in the film, or was it really Andy Williams?
We were heading back to her place.
Terri started mimicking the female leads on the way from the station. Hayworth’s purr. Bacall’s growl. Bette Davis’ feline snarling. "Fasten your seatbelts! It’s going to be a bumpy night!"

From 'Postcards from Terri', h/b Sarob Press, p/b as part of 'No-man and Other Tales' , Pendragon Press. Copyright (c) Tony Richards 2004.

TWO TALES OF ONE CITY

A while back, my publishers asked me to write a couple of short pieces -- musings really -- on the creation of Raine's Landing for their own blog, outofthiseos.typepad.com. In case you missed them, here they are again.

On the whole Salem witches idea:
The weird thing is, when I first showed the opening chapters of 'Dark Rain' to Eos, there were no Salem witches. The town was there, the characters were in place, and I knew I wanted a kind of magic to prevail that sometimes went extremely badly wrong. But my original idea was that any spells cast were linked to the life force of the person casting them, what they call in the Orient the ‘chi.’ And if someone’s inner force was all messed up, then the magic went the same way too.
It took Diana a while to get back to me, by which time I’d gone more than a little cold on that idea. And by the tone of her email, she concurred. So I called her office.

"I just think it’s a little twee," she told me. "See if you can come up with something else."
So I promised her I’d get back in the next couple of days. But the moment I hung up, my mind just started buzzing. It was like one of those word-association games.
Raine’s Landing is in Massachusetts. What else is in Massachusetts? Boston? No use in this context. Hold it … Salem! The witchcraft trials. Nineteen innocent people hanged because of a substance called ergot in the rye bread. But what if there really were some witches there, and they saw what was coming and …?
Having told Diana I’d be back to her in two days, I phoned her again in precisely ten minutes. Inspiration really does come in a sudden flash sometimes.

On the process of creating an imaginary town:
Supernatural stories really do find good settings in fictitious towns, now don’t they? That’s because, when you read such a tale, you are wandering from the real world to a place that looks like it, but under the surface is not. My first ever visit to such a community was a superb and everlasting one … Ray Bradbury’s Green Town, Illinois. The images of that place linger clearly in my memory a good few decades later on. I’ve visited many others since then, and have created a few myself.
Shaddaton. Tennsville. Hope’s Hatch. I’ve published several set in an imaginary coastal town called Birchiam-on-Sea, and they’ve been very well received.
And then there’s Raine’s Landing. And though it’s a labor of love, there is a lot of effort involved in summoning up such a township in the reader’s imagination.
Yes, I know contemporaries of mine have created whole fictional countries, worlds and galaxies and even universes. But the point about a medium-sized town is that you have to be very specific. What are the districts? What are they like? The major and minor streets? The characters -- how do they dress, speak? What are their foibles? And who are there friends?
So -- not normally a very organized guy -- I’ve wound up drawing maps and making lists and keeping detailed notes, just to make sure I get everything correct. There a difference between ‘fantastic’ and ‘surreal,’ you see. Surreal means there are no rules. In fantasy, there are firm ones. They’re just different to the ones you’re used to.

AN AUTHOR SIGNS WHILE A NATION DECIDES

November 4th, 2008, will be remembered by most people as a pretty auspicious day, one on which history was made. And what was I doing that momentous evening? I was in the wonderful Dark Delicacies bookstore, Burbank, CA, signing copies not only of 'Dark Rain' -- Book #1 in the Raine's Landing series -- but of my collections 'Shadows and Other Tales' and 'Passport to Purgatory,' plus the latest 'Mammoth Book of Horror,' which contains one of my stories. And some people turned up clutching magazines from the Eighties with my fiction in them. That's a lot of signing! I wound up -- appropriately -- with writer's cramp. But thanks to Del and Sue of DD for being such wonderful hosts.

Even better, afterwards, there was a party to celebrate both the birthday and 20 year professional career of Britain's top horror and dark fantasy editor, Stephen Jones. The picture is of -- left to right -- Steve, myself (dog-tired after a convention, a flight from Calgary to LA, a lengthy signing, and dragging around the Valley with Steve and chums the whole previous day), and Pete Atkins, author and scriptwriter of Hellraiser and Wishmaster fame. And appropriately, we're posed in front of posters of some Clive Barker films. (Photo by Peter Coleburn, copyright (c) 2008 Peter Coleburn.)