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Chatelaine Magazine asked me what my Top 5 Thriller Reads of All Time are, and though it was hard as hell to shave it down to a number that small, it was fun to really ask myself what books have stayed with me, influenced me, rewired my brain the most.
Read! Violently Disagree! Cheer! Read the books! Repeat!
Despite my best efforts at denial and Tantric time-slowing, 2013 is winding down. It’s been a great year hereabouts, and for a number of reasons. I’m grateful for all of it – I’m grateful just to be around, to be honest, “good” year or “bad” – and that includes you all for checking in and maybe reading the books and maybe enjoying them and maybe even telling me so. It means just about everything to me.
So here’s to a happy and time-slowed 2014! Enjoy!
It may be a little surprising to see a novel about demons among the Christmas season picks in a national newspaper, but that’s where you’ll find The Demonologist this morning in the Globe and Mail’s Best 100 Books of the Year list.
It’s a wonderful honour to be on it, as it includes amazing Canadian fiction, non-fiction, international titles, graphic, poetry, the whole multi-genre bag. Happy Evil Holidays!
The insightful and attractive people over at Amazon.ca have recently announced their Top 20 favourite books of 2013, and The Demonologist is one of them! They have it coming in at #16 overall (and that includes international and non-fiction titles as well as fiction).
I’m pleased about this, naturally – and doubly so because my novel is a thriller (a psychological horror thriller, to be even more categorical) – and books like mine rarely find their way through such Best Of filters. Very grateful.
You can check out all the lists here:
Today’s the day that the e-book edition of Lost Girls, my first novel, becomes available as an electro-read in the U.S. for the first time.
First published back through the dimmest mists of time (that is, 1999), it’s a book that keeps on inventing new lives for itself. And look at it now! All shiny and digitized!
Simon & Schuster (both in the U.S. and Canada) will be the publisher of my next two novels, and I honestly couldn’t be happier!! Everyone on both sides of the 49 have been great to work with on The Demonologist, none greater than my editor, Sarah Knight.
Publishers Weekly announced the deal today:
PW – Deals Column, May 20, 2013
The first book is currently titled Ash, and though the PW piece says a bit more about it, I think I’ll keep mum myself for now. I will say this though: I’m having a blast writing it…
I reviewed Dan Brown’s latest, Inferno, over at the National Post. Given the embargoes and secrecy and rules surrounding the release of the book, I ended up with about 24 hours to read and write about it, so the whole thing’s a bit of a blur. Then again, I think Dan Brown books are meant to be blurs. Puzzle-packed and jetting around and not knowing quite what the hell is going on but that’s okay, you don’t really have to.
You’ve got to hand it to him, though: he’s found his thing, and nobody does it like he does. And as they say of a certain beer here in Canada – the one I drink, as a matter of fact: “Those who like it, like it a lot.”
Wowza! (Is that even a word? I don’t care. I’ve never really liked “Yowza” and, to hell with it, I just like “Wowza”). Let me try that again…
Wowza! The Demonologist is a National Bestseller in Canada for a 9th straight week. Thanks, y’all.
What a great way to push back against a gloomy Monday morning: waking to see that The Demonologist was chosen by the Mail on Sunday (UK) as its Thriller of the Week!
“[The Demonologist] is a chilling exploration of how we all have to do battle with our own demons.” – Mail on Sunday (UK)
I’ve written a column for the Review section of The Wall Street Journal, published today, about writing horror. It’s 700 or so words, and therefore is something less than an exhaustive discussion of the topic (!), but I feel there’s truth in the gist of it. And what’s the gist?
“The most effective horror writing turns not on the scarer but the scaree: The personal motivations of the character going down into a dark cellar makes a scene frightening and involving, not what he ends up seeing—or perhaps being devoured by—at the bottom of the stairs.”
To illustrate the point I use examples from some scare masters, namely Henry James, Ira Levin and Stephen King, along with some schmuck named Pyper.
You can check out the whole thing here: