Interview with JUSTIN CALL

February 2, 2019 Civilian Reader Interview Fantasy, Gollancz, Grimdark, Justin Call, Justin Travis Call, Master of Sorrows, Most Anticipated 2019, Silent Gods Series

Let’s start with an introduction: Who is Justin Call?

Justin Call – creator, storyteller, teacher, and analyst.

Actually, I’m not an analyst, but I spend more time analyzing things in a typical day than most analysts probably do in a week. I can’t help it. I analyze people, places, stories, games, social situations, and anything else that strikes my fancy. As a professional, I also write books, design and publish board games, and teach English to kids in China. I’m also a stay-at-home dad, and juggling the aforementioned jobs while watching my kiddos can be difficult (but rewarding).

Your debut novel, Master of Sorrows, is due to be published by Gollancz in February 2019. It looks really interesting: How would you introduce it to a potential reader? Is it part of a series?

It is interesting. Master of Sorrows is the first book in a tetralogy called The Silent Gods. The premise of the series is best phrased in the form of a rhetorical question (which, incidentally, is how I usually pitch the book to folks): ‘What if the prophesied hero were actually the reincarnation of an evil god? Would he save the world… or destroy it?’ If readers think long enough about that question, they’ll discover a lot of interesting themes that keep reappearing in the series such as ‘the nature of evil’ and the concept of the ‘monstrous other.’ Continue reading →

Interview with ADAM SCOVELL

February 1, 2019 Civilian Reader Interview Adam Scovell, Fiction, Influx Press, Mothlight

Let’s start with an introduction: Who is Adam Scovell?

I’m a writer and filmmaker from Merseyside now living in South London. I’m a Doctor of music but I’m more known for writing about film and literature, as well as sometimes making short films on super-8 when money is available.

Your new novel, Mothlight, will be published by Influx Press in February. It looks rather intriguing: How would you introduce it to a potential reader?

I’d say Mothlight is an unusual story of obsession where a narrator’s mania is told through photographs and ghosts. It’s an analogue haunting where avoidance of the present becomes an addiction, even a compulsion, and where a sense of the self becomes porous and unstable. Continue reading →

Quick Review: THE NIGHT AGENT by Matthew Quirk (William Morrow)

January 31, 2019 Civilian Reader Review Conspiracy, Matthew Quirk, Most Anticipated 2019, Must Read 2019, Night Agent, Suspense, Thriller, William Morrow

A fast-paced, gripping political conspiracy thriller

To find a Russian mole in the White House, an FBI agent must question everything… and trust no one

No one was more surprised than FBI Agent Peter Sutherland when he’s tapped to work in the White House Situation Room. From his earliest days as a surveillance specialist, Peter has scrupulously done everything by the book, hoping his record will help him escape the taint of his past. When Peter was a boy, his father, a section chief in FBI counterintelligence, was suspected of selling secrets to the Russians — a catastrophic breach that had cost him his career, his reputation, and eventually his life.

Peter knows intimately how one broken rule can cost lives. Nowhere is he more vigilant than in this room, the sanctum of America’s secrets. Staffing the night action desk, his job is monitoring an emergency line for a call that has not — and might never — come.

Until tonight.

At 1:05 a.m. the phone rings. A terrified young woman named Rose tells Peter that her aunt and uncle have just been murdered and that the killer is still in the house with her. Before their deaths, they gave her this phone number with urgent instructions: “Tell them OSPREY was right. It’s happening…”

The call thrusts Peter into the heart of a conspiracy years in the making, involving a Russian mole at the highest levels of the government. Anyone in the White House could be the traitor. Anyone could be corrupted. To save the nation, Peter must take the rules into his own hands and do the right thing, no matter the cost. He plunges into a desperate hunt for the traitor — a treacherous odyssey that pits him and Rose against some of Russia’s most skilled and ruthless operatives and the full force of the FBI itself.

Peter knows that the wider a secret is broadcast, the more dangerous it gets for the people at the center. With the fate of the country on the line, he and Rose must evade seasoned assassins and maneuver past jolting betrayals to find the shocking truth — and stop the threat from inside before it’s too late.

That surprisingly long synopsis does set up the plot for Matthew Quirk’s latest fast-paced thriller rather well. Peter Sutherland is languishing in the basement of the White House, working for two prominent administration staffers, in a strange, important-yet-unexciting job. Then, with a single phone call, his job and life is thrown completely out of whack. What follows is 400~ pages of breakneck paced thriller action and conspiracy. This is an entertaining, well-written thriller. Continue reading →

Quick Review: LOLA by Melissa Scrivner Love (Broadway Books)

January 30, 2019 Civilian Reader Review Broadway Books, Crime, Lola, Lola Vasquez Series, Los Angeles, Melissa Scrivner Love, Oneworld, Point Blank

An interesting twist on LA crime fiction

The Crenshaw Six are a small but up-and-coming gang in South Central LA who have recently been drawn into an escalating war between rival drug cartels. To outsiders, the Crenshaw Six appear to be led by a man named Garcia… but what no one has figured out is that the gang’s real leader (and secret weapon) is Garcia’s girlfriend, a brilliant young woman named Lola. Lola has mastered playing the role of submissive girlfriend, and in the man’s world she inhabits she is consistently underestimated. But in truth she is much, much smarter — and in many ways tougher and more ruthless — than any of the men around her, and as the gang is increasingly sucked into a world of high-stakes betrayal and brutal violence, her skills and leadership become their only hope of survival.

It took me a while to get around to reading this novel — another case of on Kindle, can’t see it on a shelf, so out of mind… I’m very glad that I finally got to it, though: this is a very good, interesting and well-written crime novel. Continue reading →

Interview with WAYNE HOLLOWAY

January 29, 2019January 31, 2021 Civilian Reader Interview Bindlestiff, Fiction, Influx Press, Sci-Fi, Wayne Holloway

Let’s start with an introduction: Who is Wayne Holloway?

I am a writer/director working in commercials, content and film/TV, based in London. I have spent a lot of time working in LA over the years. Have been writing fiction for the past five years, inspired in some ways by a job that has taken me around the world and back. To try and write beyond what I know biographically, but starting there, with things I have seen and heard and the people I have met, whether in life, other fiction or history…

Your new novel, Bindlestiff, was recently published by Influx Press. It looks really intriguing: How would you introduce it to a potential reader?

Bindlestiff is inspired in part by a screenplay I wrote for Forest Whittaker about 8 years ago, which never got made. So it is in part a satire on Hollywood, but no easy send up, a more tragic take on how we are all, to a larger or lesser degree (from viewer, to producer, to writer, to director, to actor, etc.), complicit in the system and the products it makes. I would say this frames the story, which, to put it simply, focuses on the escape act made by the characters in an unmade screenplay into prose. To be more precise the novel is about the relationship between these characters and the system of cultural production as it pertains to Hollywood and probably elsewhere, but here quintessentially. Continue reading →

Upcoming: DRACHENFELS and GENEVIEVE UNDEAD by Kim Newman (Black Library)

January 28, 2019January 28, 2019 Civilian Reader Upcoming Drachenfels, Fantasy, Genevieve Undead, Horror, Jack Yeovil, Kim Newman, Most Anticipated 2019, Vampire Genevieve, Warhammer

Later this year, Black Library is due to re-issue (for the second time) two classic novels set in the Warhammer world (pre-Age of Sigmar): Drachenfels and Genevieve Undead by Kim Newman. Originally published under the pseudonym Jack Yeovil, I read and thoroughly enjoyed both of these novels back in the 1990s. The new covers are fantastic, and I just wanted to share them on CR. If you’re a fan of the setting, as well as a bit of horror, then these should appeal.

DRACHENFELS (April 18th)

Detlef Sierck, the self-proclaimed greatest playwright in the world, has declared that his next production will be a recreation of the end of the Great Enchanter, Constant Drachenfels – to be staged at the very site of his death, the fortress of Drachenfels itself. But the castle’s dark walls still hide a terrible and deadly secret which may make the first night of Detlef’s masterpiece the last of his life.

GENEVIEVE UNDEAD (May 16th)

After her return from Drachenfels, Genevieve Dieudonne, the vampire femme fatale, embarks on an odyssey of self-discovery in which she must face monsters and magicians, intrigue and evil. Her journey takes her from the depths of an old theater to an accursed mansion under a deadly gothic spell, and finally to the hunt of a savage unicorn mare through haunted forests.

The final two books in the Genevieve series — Beasts in Velvet and Silver Nails — are also due to be re-issued later this year, in July. If you missed them before, then I would highly recommend you pop them on your to-buy list.

I was very lucky to meet Mr. Newman at WFC in Brighton, and he was kind enough to sign a battered copy of Drachenfels. I’m really looking forward to re-reading this excellent horror-fantasy series.

Kim Newman is also the author of (among others) the Anno Dracula and Drearcliff Grange series, both published by Titan Books.

Also on CR: Excerpt from One Thousand Monsters

Follow the Author: Website, Goodreads, Twitter

Quick Review: TURBULENCE by David Szalay (Scribner/Jonathan Cape)

January 28, 2019 Civilian Reader Review Contemporary, David Szalay, Fiction, Jonathan Cape, Scribner, Simon & Schuster, Turbulence

A novel of the intersection of twelve lives

A woman strikes up a conversation with the man sitting next to her on a plane after some turbulence. He returns home to tragic news that has also impacted another stranger, a shaken pilot on his way to another continent who seeks comfort from a journalist he meets that night. Her life shifts subtly as well, before she heads to the airport on an assignment that will shift more lives in turn.

In this wondrous, profoundly moving novel, Szalay’s diverse protagonists circumnavigate the planet in twelve flights, from London to Madrid, from Dakar to Sao Paulo, to Toronto, to Delhi, to Doha, en route to see lovers or estranged siblings, aging parents, baby grandchildren, or nobody at all. Along the way, they experience the full range of human emotions from loneliness to love and, knowingly or otherwise, change each other in one brief, electrifying interaction after the next.

This is the first of David Szalay’s novels that I have read, and it will not be the last: I was very impressed. A relatively short novel, it offers an interesting look at the lives of twelve different people and the events that connect them. Insightful and interesting, I enjoyed this. Continue reading →

Interview with STEPHEN COX

January 21, 2019December 5, 2018 Civilian Reader Interview

Let’s start with an introduction: Who is Stephen Cox?

Born in America of British parents, I spent nearly all my childhood in Bristol, and I’m now an adoptive Londoner. I have a partner and two teenage children. I’m a professional communicator, a science PhD dropout, a recovering poet, and a Quaker.

Under all those nouns are verbs.

I remember walking in the garden when I was small, telling myself stories.

Your debut novel, Our Child of the Stars, was recently published by Jo Fletcher Books. It looks really interesting: How would you introduce it to a potential reader? Is it part of a series?

It’s the Sixties, small town USA, the year of Woodstock and the moon landings. A childless couple, Gene and Molly, in the middle of a disaster, adopt a strange little boy, Cory, knowing they must hide him from the whole world to keep him safe. It’s closely about family life and unselfish love, and also, shows the big struggles for peace and change, and how decency flourishes in unexpected places. Continue reading →

New Books (December-January)

January 19, 2019January 18, 2019 Civilian Reader New Books Adam Stemple, Bret Easton Ellis, Brett Paesel, Chris Riddell, Dan Abnett, David Swinson, David Szalay, David Weber, Didrik Søderlind, J. Barton Mitchell, James Brabazon, James Swallow, Jane Yolen, Jean Edward Smith, JoAnn Chaney, Jonathan de Shalit, Karen Ellis, Karen Thompson Walker, Liv Constantine, Michael Moynihan, N.K. Jemisin, Nancy Kress, Neil Gaiman, Patrick Coleman, Preet Bharara, Robert A Caro, Sadie Jones, Sam Sykes, Sarah Gailey, V.E. Schwab, VE Schwab

Featuring: Dan Abnett, Preet Bharara, James Brabazon, Robert A. Caro, JoAnn Chaney, Patrick Coleman, Liv Constantine, Jonathan de Shalit, Bret Easton Ellis, Karen Ellis, Sarah Gailey, Neil Gaiman, N.K. Jemisin, Sadie Jones, Nancy Kress, J. Barton Mitchell, Michael Moynihan, Brett Paesel, Chris Riddell, James Swallow, V.E. Schwab, Jean Edward Smith, Didrik Søderlind, Adam Stemple, David Swinson, Sam Sykes, David Szalay, Karen Thompson Walker, David Weber, Jane Yolen

Continue reading →

Quick Review: TRIGGER by David Swinson (Mulholland)

January 17, 2019 Civilian Reader Review Crime, David Swinson, Detective, Frank Marr Series, Most Anticipated 2019, Mulholland Books, Must Read 2019, Thriller, Trigger

The third novel in the excellent Frank Marr crime series

Frank Marr was a good cop, until his burgeoning addictions to alcohol and cocaine forced him into retirement from the D.C. Metro police. Now, he’s barely eking out a living as a private investigator for a defense attorney — also Frank’s ex-girlfriend.

Ostracized by his family after a botched case that led to the death of his baby cousin, Jeffrey, Frank was on a collision course with rock bottom. Now clean and clinging hard to sobriety, Frank passes the time — and tests himself — by robbing the houses of local dealers, taking their cash and flushing their drugs down the toilet. When an old friend from his police days needs Frank’s help to prove he didn’t shoot an unarmed civilian, Frank is drawn back into the world of dirty cops and suspicious drug busts, running in the same circles that enabled his addiction those years ago.

Never one to play by the rules, Frank recruits a young man he nearly executed years before. Together — a good man trying not to go bad and a bad man trying to do good — detective and criminal charge headfirst into the D.C. drug wars. Neither may make it out.

Frank Marr is a private investigator who is trying to do good, while simultaneously battling his various (multiple) demons. The first two novels in David Swinson’s series — The Second Girl and Crime Song — were fantastic, and I blitzed through them back-to-back. Gripping, sharply written and populated with excellent characters, they are among the best novels I’ve read in years. As a result, Trigger was one of my most-anticipated novels of the year. I’m happy to report that it is another excellent crime novel, and did not disappoint. Continue reading →