My partner in darkness, Lee Murray, and I are thrilled to announce that the first book in our collaborative novel series, Hounds of the Underworld: Book 1 of The Path of Ra has found a home with Raw Dog Screaming Press, to be released in 2017. For more details see the Raw Dog Screaming press release here. With a dual protagonist structure, Hounds of the Underworld is set in a future New Zealand, and is speculative fusion of horror, detective noir, and black comedy:
On the verge of losing her laboratory, her savings, and all respect for herself, Pandora Yee lands a contract as scientific consult to the police. And with seventeen murder cases on the go, the surly inspector is happy to leave her to it. Only she’s going to need to get around, and that means her slightly unhinged little brother, Matiu, will be doing the driving, whether she likes it or not. But something about the case spooks Matiu, something other than the absence of a body in the congealing pool of blood at the warehouse, or that odd little bowl.
Matiu doesn’t like anything about this case, from the voices that screamed at him when he touched that bowl, to the way his hateful imaginary friend Makere has come back to torment him, to the fact that the victim seems to be tied up with a man from his past, a man who takes pleasure in watching dogs tear each other to pieces for profit and entertainment. He wants to protect Pandora from this, but the deeper they get, the more he realises that they’ll have to fall into hell before they have any chance of walking away. And hell is a long way down.
Raw Dog Screaming Press is an independent American publisher dedicated to putting into print the highest quality literature from the fringe. If it’s dark, deviant, off-kilter then they will sniff it out. And they do, with not one but two Bram Stoker Awards collected by authors Lucy A Snyder and Maria Alexander this past year, and a great stack of fiction in their stable, all of which “foams at the mouth”. We hope that Hounds of the Underworld fits that description!
Jennifer Barnes of RDSP says of the acquisition: “In addition to being excited about the book, we’re excited about the prospects of bringing genre work from New Zealand authors to the U.S.”
We’re excited too, and Lee and I already at work on the second book, to be released by Raw Dog Screaming Press in 2018.
(And thanks to Lee for letting me steal her web post and change the names…)
