One of the common traits among noir crime novels is that they’re quick reads. You can usually tear through one in a weekend, especially if The Simpsons are a rerun. But in talking to writer Bradley Spinelli about his noir crime novel The Painted Gun (paperback, digital), it seems that it sometimes takes a lot longer than a Simpsons-free weekend to write one of these page-turners.
While human cloning hasn’t been perfected, yet, it’s still a controversial topic that’s inspired moral, ethical, and spiritual debates. But all of these discussions have been about whether human cloning should or should not be allowed, not what happens when it does. It’s those latter kinds of questions that inspired aspects of Mur Laffery’s new sci-fi murder mystery novel Six Wakes (paperback, digital, audiobook), as you’ll see in the following interview.
When it comes to promoting new books, publishers will often get quotes from other writers working in the same genre. But in promoting Jason Rekulak’s geeky new novel The Impossible Fortress (hardcover, digital, audiobook), the good people at Simon & Schuster instead sent me a quote from programmer Dona Bailey, the co-creator of the arcade game Centipede, who said, “I absolutely love this charming and optimistic coming of age tale about making video games for love, not money.” Though if that’s not enough to spark your interest in The Impossible Fortress, maybe the following interview with Rekulak will.
In her previous novel, Brother, writer Ania Ahlborn was inspired by her, “…weird fascination with serial killers [and] extreme rural life,” while her book before that, Within These Walls, came out of her being, “…intrigued by cults.” But for her newest novel, The Devil Crept In (paperback, digital), Ahlborn has not only again looked into her own dark heart but, as she admits in the following interview, she also watched some TV.
We sometimes forget that fantasy didn’t start with J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord Of The Rings. Before Frodo and friends set off on their epic hike, there were the fantastic stories of The Brothers Grimm, Hans Christian Anderson, and others who wrote fables about fairies and other fantastic beasts. It is in that tradition that we find Oak & Mistletoe (paperback, digital), a new fantasy novel by writer JZN McCauley.
We’ve all heard the cliche about how real life is stranger than fiction. But if it’s true, where does that put fiction that’s based on real life? It’s a question I pondered, to no avail, after interviewing writer Andrew Hilleman about his new novel World, Chase Me Down (paperback, digital), a fascinating and fictionalized account of a kidnapping that took place in 1900.
While science fiction is often set in the future or some other version of our world, these stories are often really about issues from our time, from our reality. Sure, the original Star Trek was set in space…the final frontier, but it still explored contemporary problems from our world, including racism and the cost of war. It’s a tradition being continued by writer Joe M McDermott with his new military sci-fi novel, The Fortress At The End Of Time (paperback, digital), a book, he explains below, came from something he saw his family going through.
Two years ago, when I sat down to read Nick Cutter’s second novel, The Deep, I thought it was going to be a weird little sci-fi tale. It ended up being one of my favorite books of that year, one that kept me awake deep into the night so I could read the last hundred pages and figure out what the hell was going on (that I was also really freaked out and couldn’t sleep had nothing to do with it, no, no, no). With Cutter now releasing his third book, Little Heaven (hardcover, digital), I had to ask him what it was all about so I could plan my sleep schedule accordingly.
Yes, it’s a cliche, but sometimes it’s true that the more things change, the more they stay the same. Take the novels of writer James A Moore. Though he got his start writing such horror stories as Blood Red and Under The Overtree, he’s since expanded into the fantasy realm, first with his Seven Forges novels, and now with his new Tides Of War trilogy, which he just kicked off with his new novel The Last Sacrifice (paperback, digital). Though in talking to him about this dark fantasy novel, it’s clear he’s not just swapped one genre for another.