Jenner’s back! A HARD DEATH is finally coming out in the USA…
by Jonathan on April 1st, 2011
Stumbling around here, trying to figure out how this is done – damn these HTML-ignorant fingers of mine! I’m trying to announce that the US edition of A Hard Death is released on April 12th, and it’s good. The UK version was strong, but I had some down time, so I went back and polished a couple of things I wasn’t satisfied with in the original.
Pre-publication reviews been strong – I particularly liked Booklist, who went with “This is a CinemaScope novel, in technicolor and surround sound: bloody murders, hot sex, decadence, incest, drug cartels… a story of depravity that both chills and fascinates.” Because, really, who could ask for anything more?
Please consider pre-ordering it: publishers love pre-orders! It’s part of what makes them keep a writer on their roster. Order it from your favourite Indie bookstore, or go with one of the behemoths:
Via Barnes & Noble, or for the Barnes & Noble Nook
I now have these slickly horrific buttons for Amazon purchasing:
Or on Kindle:
Best of 2010: Music
by Jonathan on January 21st, 2011
I thought I’d post my Top 5 albums for 2010; if you’re a Facebook friend, you’ve probably seen these before. Hell, if you’re a Facebook friend, you could probably write this post.
1. Deerhunter, Halcyon Digest
I don’t think I’ve loved a band this much since… Radiohead, I guess. On Halcyon Digest, Deerhunter finally delivered on all the promise of the previous records. The music is precise, but sonically expansive, and beautifully, beautifully textured. I don’t really listen to lyrics, but I’d bet they’re good, too. 31 seconds into “Helicopter”, the song suddenly opens up into something perfect and exquisite, brimming with infinite possibility; that was my favourite moment in music in 2010.
2. Four Tet, There is Love in You
It’s been a kind of astonishing five years since the last full-length Four Tet album, Everything Ecstatic; I guess that astonishes me less because of the notion of how time flies than because Kieran Hebden has been constantly in heavy rotation in my iPod, through collaborations, like the stunning “Moth” with Burial, remixes like his take on Nathan Fake’s “You Are Here”, and the occasional one-off single, like “Ringer“. His great strength as a musician and remixer is an uncanny ability to find the emotional truth of a song; unsurprisingly, for a largely laptop-based album, There is Love in You is an impressively emotional thing. (Sorry there’s not a decent video for the studio version of “Angel Echoes”.)
3. James Holden, DJ Kicks Mix
The first half is stronger than the second, but this is an eclectic, beautifully sequenced and mixed mix; really, my favourite thing about it is Holden’s remix of Mogwai’s “The Sun Smells Too Loud“, which sounds like Stereolab playing Krautrock; you can find the original song here, and you should. No, you must – not only is it a fantastic song, but it’s really interesting to compare to the Holden remix.
4. Girls, Broken Hearts Club
I remain ambivalent about Girls, mostly because of Christopher Owens’ incredibly mannered singing. That said, “Carolina”, from this EP-ish follow-up to Album, is a fantastic song. The dreamy, prog-rock opening is displaced by a tentatively stepping section that leads to a wistful vocal intro to the song proper, a warm blast of alt.countrypolitan, that settles into a strummy choruses that gradually turns into a Talking Heads-circa-More-Songs-About-Buildings-and-Food era outro.
5. Caribou, Swim
Swim grew on me over the year – and actually seemed to grow over the year itself, as every remixer in Christendom climbed on board. I may be in the minority, but for me, “Sun” was its highpoint. I love this video too. I was intrigued that my friend Christine felt that they were making fun of these women; I don’t think that’s the case at all.
The Long Passage
by Jonathan on January 16th, 2011
I’ve just finished Justin Cronin’s The Passage (Balantine), a book that received a lot of attention at the time of its release for a number of reasons, among them that it was perceived as a genre work by a “literary” author, its large rumored advance, and the $1.75 million that Ridley Scott paid for movie adaptation rights. It was a shrewd move on Scott’s part – the book is an excellent read, fresh and cinematic in scope.
The Passage begins with the story of Amy, a little girl whose mother, a decent woman, is forced by circumstances into prostitution. Gradually braided into that narrative are a series of emails from a scientist on a research journey into the South American jungle; he expresses concern that the US military is involved in the expedition, mentions bats and finally reports that they’re being massacred. Back in the US, two federal agents travel around the country, picking up a squad of death row inmates for a sinister and secret government project.
And with that, the basic seeds of The Passage are sown. But the story fairly quickly takes an abrupt jump from thriller-y set-up to post-apocalyptic quest story – it reminded me of anime, in the way that the narrative suddenly blasts from quotidian to cosmic in implication.
As you are probably aware, The Passage is a vampire story, but it’s a vampire story only in the sense that the creatures are incredibly strong, fast, blood-drinking monsters. Cronin has very cleverly reimagined the biology of vampires, which gives the book an appealing freshness; the sexy-European-man-with-retractable-fangs thing is banished, replaced by hairless, glowing, feral humanoids with long claws and rows of razor-sharp teeth.
No, it’s not a typical vampire book at all. Instead, it’s a bit like The Lord of the Rings, in which a band of ordinary individuals come together and undertake a journey to save the world against impossible odds. The Passage, however, is LoTR as a scorched earth Stephen King novel, set in a depopulated wilderness filled with fear, dread and blood.
This world – its physical appearance, its human and predator ecosystems – is what sets The Passage apart. Cronin has created a highly realistic, intricately detailed portrait of a devastated America. He presents vividly the evacuation of Philadelphia as it falls to the vampire hordes; humans clinging to life in a walled colony, defended by watchers on high catwalks and a barrier of bright electric lights that paralyze attacking virals (as the vampires are called); the Gulf of Mexico a chemical swamp filled with the rotting hulls of ships in a vast slick of oil gushing from abandoned drilling platforms.
The story kicks into high gear when it is learned that the colony’s lights will soon fail. A band of colonists must set off through a wasteland teeming with virals, making the long trek by foot to Colorado in a desperate attempt to find a solution.
The Passage could in no way be described as “a quick read” – the hardback weighed in at 784 pages. And it’s not without its flaws, the chief of which can be deduced from the page count: Cronin can be extremely and needlessly digressive, particularly in the second quarter of the book, filled with minutiae of life in the Colony. He writes well – often beautifully – but can’t stop himself from chronicling every little detail and side journey of even minor characters. Much of this is in the service of sculpting the setting, but the book would have been much better if some cruel editor had cut it by 100 or even 150 pages. Seriously, 634 pages still gives you a lot of stuff to read! There are plot holes, the length of the book means lots of characters – some of whom aren’t memorable enough to be distinguishable – and sometimes even already-suspended disbelief is strained to the breaking point, but the plot gradually takes over, and the book moves faster and faster. Overall I really liked it.
I read it on the Kindle (a bit disorienting, given its length), and so I was slightly surprised at the abrupt ending. And then pleased to hear that it’s the first of a trilogy. I really liked the book’s plotting; that there are two more to come makes it all the more impressive, if Cronin can deliver again. The fact also makes Scott seem like the canny, uh, Scot that he is.
By the way, for a funny dissenting opinion, see the one-star Amazon review entitled “It’s like somebody accidentally the last 600 pages” by ikt “Example of a Real Name”. Actually, don’t – it’s funny, and not inaccurate, but it also gives away major end-spoilage. Save it for after you read the book!
A Place for Everything
by Jonathan on September 27th, 2010
Normally when I find appealing images while crawling around the web, I dump them onto my Facebook page, but they don’t always fit. Case in point: this photograph, which is so tall and slim that it completely baffles the system.
No real reason for this, other than that it’s an amusing sight. I can’t remember where I found it – on Random Pictures, maybe.
Live, in Person!
by Jonathan on September 19th, 2010
I’m a terrible blogger, with an unprofessional blog – case in point: my thriller writer friends’ blogs all have ample coverage of their upcoming appearances. I appear, but I never wake the town and tell the people that I’m appearing.
That all changes now!
Some upcoming appearances:
September 24 – 26, 2010: The Writers’ Police Academy, Jamestown NC: I’ll be giving a lecture on forensic pathology for writers. And hopefully, at some point, gettting tased.
October 14 – 17, 2010: Bouchercon by the Bay, San Francisco, CA: I’m on serial killer panel on Saturday morning, plus walking around looking dazed for the rest of the session.
February 21-26, 2011 American Academy of Forensic Sciences, Chicago, IL: I shall be lecturing on suicide. This is a professional meeting, so you pretty much have to get through years of training, experience and accreditation. Although I’ve never noticed them checking IDs.
March 24 – 27, 2011: Left Coast Crime, Santa Fe, NM.
April-May, 2011: I’ll be doing a West Coast tour for A Hard Death. This will likely kick off with an event at the New York Public Library on 42nd Street, with a couple of local readings, then a reading in Naples, FL (the inspiration for the fictional town of Port Fontaine), and then probably San Diego, Los Angeles, Phoenix, Denver, San Francisco, Portland and Seattle.
May 19 – 21, 2011, Crimefest, Bristol, UK.
July 6 – 9, 2011, Thrillerfest, New York, NY.
I’ll do my best to update this info as it, uh, evolves. Or devolves, as the case may be.
9/11 Garage Mix
by Jonathan on September 10th, 2010
I’m always (still!) surprised by how much the 9/11 anniversary affects me. Each year I mean to have big plans, and end up holing up at home with TV and cats and music. I suppose it’s good at some level to feel it so intensely; I suppose I always feel it, just a bit more honestly this day.
There’s not much to say about it – it was the worst of times, it was the worst of times. We worked hard, and it was important work, and it hurt, from day 1 to… whenever we stopped. I remember that after a couple of days, someone put up a DAY 02 sign on the wall, and each day some mystery mortuary elf would update the number; the sign disappeared after day 99.
When we had a lull, I’d play music, which was always a challenge – matching the energy, the personnel, the mood. After we suspended operations in July of 2002, I made this compilation tape to reflect some of the stuff I’d played for people. It’s a bit all over the musical map, but it works – for me, at least, probably held together by the glue of sentiment. I burned a few CD’s at the time, but who listens to CD’s any more? So tonight I mixed the collection into a quasi-seamless MP3, suitable for playing on your iPod, or PC, or ignoring completely.
Here’s the tracklist:
1. The James Gang, “Ashes, The Rain”
2. Fatboy Slim, “Right Here, Right Now”
3. St. Germain, “Rose Rouge”
4. Looper, “Mondo ’77″
5. New Order, “Crystal”
6. Royksopp, “Sparks”
7. Goldfrapp, “Lovely Head”
8. Royksopp, “A Higher Place”
9. Swans, “Can’t Find My Way Home”
As I say, it’s all over the place musically, but I do love these songs. The James Gang opener is a bit maudlin, but I don’t think the mix is as a whole. I only played “Ashes, The Rain” once, if I remember: I include it here mostly because the string line at the end is used as the basis for Fatboy Slim’s “Right Here, Right Now”. The mix does end soft, and sad, though.
You can download it here.
Covers – continued
by Jonathan on July 18th, 2010
A German reader let me know that the German edition of A Hard Death is now available for pre-order, with an October publication date. Droemer-Knaur have given the book a snappy new title, and used a cover that recaptures the graphic spirit of their edition of Precious Blood (German title: Martyrium).
I like the cover, and am entertained by the new title, TORTUR, the English translation of which is – I’m going out on a limb here- TORTURE.
I don’t think I quite appreciate how brutal my books are in the eyes of some readers. I’m fairly matter of fact about violence – I approach violent death with scientific detachment, a detachment essential for understanding the facts of a homicide without being distracted by my emotional reactions to its brutality. My life as a forensic pathologist involves extreme contrasts – torture, murder, Bach, lobster; in my writing, I try to present that collision of sudden, unspeakable violence with everyday life.
Anyway, welcome, TORTUR!
I just wonder what the hell they’ll call Jenner 4, now that they’ve already used TORTUR…
Covers: A Post-script
by Jonathan on July 6th, 2010
By curious coincidence, just after I’d blathered on about my book covers, Goran Alfred from Bra Bocker, who are publishing the Swedish edition of Precious Blood, sent me the cover he’d designed. This is another cover that’s more about graphic design than illustration; it has a visceral quality that’s quite bracing, but I really like it.
I told Goran it reminded me tonally/texturally of one of my favourite video game series, the survival horror franchise called Silent Hill. Since he’s not a gamer, I sent him a clip of the game. I’m just realizing he never replied – I hope he wasn’t offended by the comparison! I better check…
Cover Stories
by Jonathan on July 2nd, 2010
I’ve just learned that the U.S. publication date for A Hard Death will be April 12, 2011; I don’t understand the complexities of publishing, and have to admit that I’m a bit disappointed that it’s taking so long to come out here. I’m going to do my best to make sure that the third book, tentatively titled City of Rust, arrives a little more promptly.
The delay is actually a bonus: I’m using the time to tighten and polish. There’s an old writing adage that “a novel is never finished, it’s abandoned” – it’s a real luxury to have the time to touch up an already “abandoned” project…
I really like both the new US hardcover jacket for A Hard Death (above) and the paperback cover for last year’s UK release. The two covers are carefully designed, reflecting local taste and the practicalities of marketing a book on a bookshelf – I suspect that the UK cover wouldn’t have played as well with US readers as it did with those in the UK.
The US cover for A Hard Deathis more literal, a watery swamp forest bathed in a golden red glow; that intense colour will make the book “pop” on the shelf. Unlike the clean, urbane font used for the US Precious Blood jacket, where the story was set largely in New York City, the designer has gone with a battered, almost Western/vintage-style font that, by coincidence or design, evokes the UK cover, particularly the font used for my name.
The UK cover is visually edgier, bristling with visceral style. It’s of a piece with the UK cover for Precious Blood, which reminded me of blood spatter on an abatoir floor. For the new book, the concrete has been swapped out for an impressionistic backdrop of light filtering into a clearing through rotted trees, perfect for the Florida Everglades setting of A Hard Death. Since it’s a paperback, and smaller than a hardcover, the title and author name are much larger, easily legible across the bookshop.
I have to admit that my initial reaction to the UK cover for Precious Blood was a little like one of those movie scenes where a character is sitting for hours, having her portrait painted. The bearded, beatnik artist paints furiously, eyes flicking repeatedly from subject to canvas as he captures her likeness in minute detail. Finally, he pronounces the work a finished masterpiece. The sitter approaches the canvas only to discover that it is an incomprehensible mess of drips and spatters. After my initial surprise, I quickly grew to like the cover – I think it’s very effective, the style working well at a gut level to convey the brutality and violence of serial murder. I did feel that, while the design captured the book’s urban mayhem, I peronally saw Precious Blood in very deep rich colours, full of expressive, nuanced visual detail; to me, the UK cover felt a little reductive, the story distilled to blood on concrete. I think I liked the UK cover for A Hard Death better both because it was more literal and more organic (yeah, the trees may be dead, but, still – trees!), and also because I had a clearer idea of what to expect.
I really loved the very direct cover for the German edition of Precious Blood. The Gothic text works really well, I think; indeed, I was a little surprised by how much I liked the simple, graphic style. Note that they decided to go with another title – Precious Blood has, I believe, richer connotations in English than in German.
The Dutch cover kind of baffled me – I won’t tell you what I thought it was the first time I saw it! But I do love the title in Dutch; my first unaccompanied trip as a kid was to the Netherlands, and I hold a special place for the country in my heart.
There were a couple more editions in German. This one was for the Austrian market – quite chaste in comparison with the second German edition that follows it! Note: the book is not this tiny in real life…
This is the cover of the most recent German edition. In her review of Precious Blood, USA Today critic Carol Memmott was kind enough to use the phrase “nail-biting masterpiece”, but they captioned the cover photo “like a literary equivalent of horror flick Saw“! Those of you who know me know I’m too much of a wuss to ever watch that film…
Anyway, yes, this cover looks like it would be perfect for the literary equivalent of horror flick Saw…
Finally, my friend Kevin Krooss had his own ideas about how the Precious Blood cover should look:
Of course, when Kevin learned there would be a Swedish edition, he couldn’t resist having a crack at that, too…
A Carter Burwell song no more…
by Jonathan on February 10th, 2010
My dear friend the lovely Christine Joly de Lotbinière tells me that not only is today (a blizzard in New York City) the perfect day to stay home from work, it’s also the perfect day to blog. And I can’t disagree with her.
Because of the weather, I’ve been thinking of the music of the prodigiously talented Carter Burwell, whose scores you’ve doubtless heard many times.
First up, his wonderful “She Began to Lie”, from the otherwise forgettable John Travolta thriller THE GENERAL’S DAUGHTER . It’s an interesting song, most frequently covered as “Sea Lion Woman” (most recently by Feist), but probably most famous for Nina Simone’s racing, passionate cover, “See Line Woman”. The song’s meaning is somewhat obscure; Burwell is probably closest to the true title, the song lyric a litany of lies a woman tells – I think Simone’s version specifically has the woman as a prostitute (as did all Simone songs, haha, I joke). But I’ve also heard it’s a corruption of an underground railway route, “C-Line”, from the days of slavery. (The “Rock Island Line”, subject of a stomping, slapback rockabilly song by the great Johnny Cash, was also an underground railway line.)
Anyway, when Feist sings:
Sea lion woman, sea lion
She drink coffee, sea lion
She drink tea, sea lion
And rooster crows, sea lion
Sea lion woman
Dressed in red
Smile at the man
Stab him in his back
I’m thinking “Yeah, Feist, maybe… But wouldn’t it work better as ‘she lying woman’?” You can hear Christine and Katherine Shipp sing the original on the fantastic Rounder release A Treasury of Library of Congress Field Recordings ; recorded in the late 1930′s, the song was already old, maybe a work song. It sounds like Burwell sampled that recording for the vocal here, and did the arrangement. But it’s a fantastic arrangement, the skipping beat, the way the banjo is processed (the ghostly backwards banjo at the beginning, the eerie reverb), and the mournful harmonica. Burwell also remixed the song, but the straight version is the one you want…
Sorry about the video, btw – it’s got some tiresome British vocal loop underneath it to convey some sort of political/artistic message.
Stop the presses! I just learned that it’s not Burwell who gets credit for the song, but Greg Hale Jones! My apologies to Mr. Jones – since I’ve already gassed on at length, I’m going to post it here anyway. I’m assuming Mr. Burwell had some say in what was included. The good news is that, while the song is album-only on the General’s Daughter soundtrack, you can buy a 2:39 minute version on Mr. Jones’s EP Now There is a Tree of Ghosts. (That title, by the way, probably refers to one of my favourite records of all time, My Life in the Bush of Ghosts by Brian Eno and David Byrne, which also builds arrangements around samples of traditional singers.) Buying the General’s Daughter soundtrack will get you the 5:20 minute original, plus the shorter, more electronic remix. And hopefully a chunk of change for Mr. Jones.
This next one definitely is a Carter Burwell song, “Bella’s Lullaby” from the Twilight films. I don’t think the films are wildly good, but I enjoy pop cultural phenomena – I saw the first one opening weekend, on a long distance date with a girl who watched it in a cinema in Colorado while I watched in Manhattan. I particularly like the intro to the theme; it reminds me a little of Philip Glass’s lovely score for The Secret Agent.
Finally, one of Burwell’s best-known compositions, his theme from Miller’s Crossing, here used as the score to a beautiful trailer for The Last Guardian by visionary game designer Fumito Ueda, whose Ico kept me sane in the difficult months after 9/11. I had the thrill of meeting Mr. Ueda in Tokyo a few years back, and got to play an early build of Shadow of the Colossus , a huge thing for me. Ueda’s games are characterized by lyrical emotionality; they are elegantly sensual games, shot through with an elegiac undercurrent – everything feels a little sad.
I think this was recorded live at the unveiling of Ueda’s latest project at the E3 games convention in the summer of 2009 – turn up the volume, as it’s quiet…
