Ass-Kicking Review: Black Hand Gang

Hello everyone!

Okay, as much as possible I try to lump reviews together into reviewspam posts, this one deserves its own special post.

Author Keith Harvey in Dallas, on his blog Red Rook Review, has written a thoughtful, glowing review of Pat Kelleher's No Man's Word: Black Hand Gang, in quite detailed lit-crit terminology. It was a delight to read.

Read It Here

To pick up on a couple of quotes:

As I read I determined quickly that the prose is tight and well-honed, and that this guy Kelleher, who I have never heard of, has the chops. I surmise this isn't his first time out.

First, it is well-crafted, as I said; Kelleher structures each chapter to create suspense and take us onto the next, and the research spot-on. I believed the early chapters in no man's land implicitly, just as I did later when the situs morphs onto a new world and the heroes find themselves in a hostile environment. This bump, this movement from the known world of France during World War I to the secondary world, makes the novel ultimately a portal novel in the grand tradition of Edgar Rice Burroughs, John Norman, David Lindsay, and even C. S. Lewis.

Good stuff, eh?

Cheers,

David

More Reviewspam...

Hey all,

Some online reviewery for you:

Mass Movement Magazine has posted this very brief review of Rebecca Levene's The Infernal Game: Ghost Dance. Jim Dodge Jr doesn't say a whole lot because he doesn't want to spoil the book for you, but he's clearly excited:

"Yes, I loved it!"

Jim Jr's also thrown up a nice little review of Scott Andrews's The Afterblight Chronicles: Children's Crusade. He feels "these characters have run their course," which is probably just as well as Crusade wraps up the storyline, but is still very complimentary. Cheers, Jim.

"With no lack of fighting and adventure, this book is an exciting read."

In a bit of an Abaddon frenzy, Mass Movement's Ian Glasper also offers us a review of Pat Kelleher's No Man's World: Black Hand Gang. Ian seems to feel that stories of soldiers mysteriously tranported to alien worlds should be more believable - and I'm sure Pat will take that on board - but nevertheless seems to have enjoyed himself.

"Told you it was going to be a wild ride, and it does belt along at a breathless pace, probably so you don’t have time to sit back and consider how daft it all is."

In the meantime, Emotionally Fourteen's Blake Harmer has also reviewed Black Hand Gang, and he properly loved it.

"A thoroughly enjoyable read [that] will keep you entertained if you like your sci-fi action stories."

Weston Ochse interviews Pat Kelleher!

PAT KELLEHER is the author of Abaddon's upcoming new series, 'No Man's World' - which starts with Black Hand Gang, due to be released on June 15th!



WESTON OCHSE is the Bram Stoker Award-winning author of Abaddon's zombie horror novel, Empire of Salt. He lives in Arizona, and gave us a dead scorpion when we met him in Brighton. No, really! Okay, it was in the form of a glittery souvenir paperweight...

In march, we had Pat Kelleher interview Weston Ochse to celebrate the release of Empire of Salt! Well, with Pat's Black Hand Gang just around the corner, it's time for Weston to get his own back!

Weston: How did you meet the folks at Abaddon? I assume it was the same dark room selection committee involving shaving cream, steel wool, hula hoops and the Greatest Hits of Abba played at disorienting decibels that I went through.

Pat: You got a selection committee!? You lucky bugger. I was press ganged. I've known fellow Abaddon author Mike Wild for years now. We regularly sit in the pub, drinking pints of Everson's Old Fusilier, batting ideas around, world-building and the like. Little did I suspect I was being groomed (don't take drinks from writers, kids). After one particularly heavy session I woke in an unfamiliar basement chained to a radiator with only the lurid green light of an ancient word processor for company. If I make my daily allotted word count they feed me. If sales are good on Black Hand Gang they've promised me a window.

The truth? When Mike mentioned that the mariner character in the Kerberos world bible was still up for grabs he suggested I put in a pitch. I was hammering it out when I'd found out that Jon Oliver had taken it on, so having just missed my chance at writing for the Kerberos series and not having a zombie or post-apocalyptic idea in my head, when I heard that Abaddon had a one line brief rattling around about WW1 soldiers I seized on it with alacrity, jumping through all the usual hoops of a pitch, a world bible, a sample chapter and chapter breakdown before securing the commission. Throughout the whole process Jon was enthusiastic and encouraging and there was a flurry of emails with Simon Parr, their designer as we thrashed out ideas and sourced reference material for a really a cool cover.* But other than that I have still to meet any of them in the flesh. Strange, that.

Some of Simon's Parr's concept art for the cover image.

The idea of a WWI unit being transported to a hostile planet is intriguing. Can you describe the genesis of the novel?

It's a local war memorial; a bronze statue of a Tommy on a plinth that made an indelible impression on me when I first saw it in childhood, it's a great uncle who died at the Third Battle of Ypres, it's TV documentaries about the Great War containing haunting interviews with survivors.

Beyond that, the initial spark of the story was based in fact, well, I say fact, in that there had been a WW1 battalion that actually vanished in battle; the First 5th Norfolks who, contemporary myth had it, advanced into a cloud at Gallipoli and never came out. The myth persisted in the popular press for a few years but after the war, when the truth was eventually uncovered it was altogether more prosaic and tragic than the legend would have you believe. Nevertheless, the magical 'what if' seed had been planted.**

I felt, as a new Abaddon series, it should have its own distinct tone, something they hadn't done before, and took my initial cues from the books of the period, back when Science Fiction was still called 'Scientific Romance'. Black Hand Gang continues the tradition of those stories, but totally Abaddoned up. Fast paced action and imperialist adventure for the 21st century. If it helps, imagine Charley's War drawn by Kevin O'Neill. I put together a three page pitch and fired it off on the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month, 2008, the one hundredth anniversary of the Armistice, precisely. Talk about a niche marketing opportunity.

And if this was going to be a First World War battalion, then I really wanted to nail that reality, otherwise it might as well be anybody on an alien planet, so I pored over field manuals, I read journals, diaries, contemporary accounts. I began cherry-picking things from the period that looked interesting; Tesla was claiming to have received extraterrestrial radio signals, there was the rise of the Labour Movement, the General Strike, women's suffrage, Anarchist bombing and shootings and, as I read, the men in the 13th Battalion of the Pennine Fusiliers took on a life of their own. They signed up, made the oath and took the Abaddon shilling, the poor sods. But the War was only half of it.

I always knew the planet was going to be a badass place. Most stories of this period are presented by the author with a mysterious provenance, a journalistic first hand account, letters, an unpublished journal, and so it was with the 13th Pennine Fusiliers. Once I realised that this provenance included silent black and white film, I finally knew that this was the planet, the grainy footage of which would go on to inspire a thousand pulp science fiction magazine covers; untamed and inhospitable even for its indigenous inhabitants: a harsh environment of unforgiving habitats populated by dangerous plants and beasts. Then it just became a case of mashing the two together.


Why WWI soldiers? It seems to me that the weapons and technology wouldn't be the best for combating aliens. I haven't read your book yet, but why not more modern weapons, such as SABOT tank rounds or Hellfire Missiles?

Well, if I'm honest, the weapons were never a primary concern. I knew I wanted a Mark 1 tank, putting the date no earlier than September 1916. I knew I wanted the Somme which only left me a two month window. What ever was available up to and including October 31st 1916 would have to do. Those are the weapons with which I and the Pennines were stuck. And to be honest, I really enjoy having those sorts of limitations.

Sure, the weapons might appear crude by today's standards but in their day they were cutting edge, state-of-the-art and really brought the 'Splodey.

You can ratchet up a body count real quick with a Vickers water-cooled machine-gun (and make a cup of tea into the bargain - how British is that?).

And don't even get me started on gas warfare. Heck, manned flight was barely 10 years old and they'd already figured out how to use it to kill people.

German machine-gun tactics had just changed the face of modern warfare for ever. The British response, the Ironclad landship? It was ripped straight from an HG Wells story. This was Science Fiction becoming science fact right there, right then. This was real life steampunk. These weapons may not be the best for combating aliens, but I for one wouldn't want to be on the receiving end.

So while I can't offer you SABOT tank rounds, depleted uranium bullets or daisy cutters I can offer plum puddings, toffee apples, whizz-bangs, minnies and monsters, with a side order of bayonets 'n' British Pluck served up in a rollicking good yarn.

A Mark 1 WW1 tank - just like the one used by Pat's Pennine Fusiliers in Black Hand Gang

Clearly you enjoy good science fiction. What are a few of your favorite science fiction novels and was there any one in particular that lent more inspiration for Black Hand Gang than others?

I enjoy good fiction full stop. I'm old enough to have read the 'classics'; Asimov, Clarke, Herbert, Bradbury, Harrison. Mind you, back then anything with a Chris Foss cover would do. I read Phillip K Dick, Greg Bear, China Meiville, Dan Abnett but as for individual books? Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle's, The Mote in God's Eye, Ian M Banks Culture novels, Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash, Paul Cornell's Summertime, Maria Doria Russell's The Sparrow, Carl Sagan's Contact. But Science Fiction is not something to which I restrict myself. I've probably read a lot more fantasy than Science Fiction recently and a whole lot more that isn't either. I buy books faster than I can read 'em, all kinds of stuff. I've added several feet of WW1 research to my shelves in the past year or so which I'm still ploughing through so I haven't had time for much else.

But for my main inspiration, you'd have to go back a hundred years or more.

Authors like HG Wells, Arthur Conan Doyle, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Edwin L Arnold, and Rudyard Kipling. If there were any that had a more direct inspiration on the Black Hand Gang I'd say Arthur Conan Doyle's Professor Challenger stories with a soupcon of John Carter and a seasoning of Gullivar Jones, if not in the specifics at least in the spirit. That's not to say that I'm ignoring a century of Science Fiction. It's just that, filtered through a 1916 character you might not immediately recognize some of it.

They certainly wouldn't. We can sit here today and talk about quantum entanglement, wormholes, M-theory and the like, but back then probably only a half a dozen people in the world understood what the hell Einstein was talking about.


What are your plans when Black Hand Gang hits the streets? Are we talking world tour? Over here in America, I've found that I have so many favorite authors who live in England and I get to meet too few of them.
Folks like Tim Lebbon and Simon Clark I get to see regularly when they travel to America. What about you? Is there going to be a Black Hand Intergalactic Megatour so that all your fans in American and points west can shake your hand and thank you for such great writing? What about getting Abaddon to send you on a whirlwind tour of the Hawaiian Islands? I'll carry your bags...

Well, by the time Black Hand Gang comes out I'll be back in the trenches, deep in the mud of the second novel, I might not have time to stick my head above the parapet, so initially at least I'm hoping to develop more of a web presence. I have some ideas I'm working up to that end. Keep checking here for news. And then, yeah, a breath of fresh air would be good. I'd love to get out to some conventions. I'll be popping up wherever I get the chance.

And an American tour would be great, but I suspect the only way that's going to happen in the near future is if I smuggle myself over in Jon's baggage.

In which case you won't be carrying my bags - I will be the bags. Just don't drop me, or worse, leave me unattended.


*Go here to read about Simon's Black Hand Gang cover design at his blog.
**Go here to read about the lost Sandringham battalion.

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Pat Kelleher interviews Weston Ochse!

WESTON OCHSE is the Bram Stoker Award-winning author of Abaddon's upcoming zombie horror novel, Empire of Salt. He lives in Arizona, but if you're a Brit and you fancy meeting him, get on down to the Brighton World Horror Con next week, where he'll be reading from and signing copies of his book!




PAT KELLEHER is the author of Abaddon's upcoming new series, 'No Man's World' - which starts with Black Hand Gang, due to be released this spring!



PK: With all of time and space in which to set your Zombie novel, Empire of Salt, the Salton Sea is a very specific location. What was it about that place that appealed you as a setting for a story, let alone a Zombie-pocalypse (without giving too many spoilers)?

WO: Location. Location. Location. Like in advertizing and commerce, novels must have a sense of place. Some novels are made for the normal and everyday. We hide the events of the plot in the mundane of every day. We want people to think that what they have could change at any minute.

But then some novels cry out for exotic locales, especially if the location is intrinsic to the plot. Song of Kali by Dan Simmons would have been a snoozer if the plot took place in Upstate New York. The novel had to be set in India. Likewise, The Shining had to be set in a remote hotel in the Rockies. A Holiday Inn near the interstate just wouldn’t have worked.

Like a lot of authors, I prefer locations that are near and dear to our hearts. I want to lull readers into recognizing street signs, businesses, parks and cultural icons, before I introduce elements of fantasy into the locale. But then there are some locations that just scream to be used; the Salton Sea is one of them.

It’s a dead sea smack dab in the middle of California that almost no one has heard of. Just south of Palm Springs the Salton Sea used to be the vacation destination that everyone went to from regular Dick and Janes, to Richie Riches of Hollywood. Now it spawns red tides of dead fish. Birds fall from the sky. Where water meets earth, it bubbles green putrid residue. Yet people still live there. God bless them, there are people too tough to be scared away or too desperate to leave. Those kind of people aren’t the normal kinds of people regular folks are used to dealing with.
Folks from the Salton Sea are made from stern stuff. They’re a little crazy. They’re a lot desperate. And they are perfect grist for my authorial mill.

And to reward them for their perseverance and never-say-die attitudes, I’ve done what any right-minded author who doesn’t care who gets hurt would do. I infested the entire area with flesh-eating, eyeball-munching zombies. How cool is that?

Abandoned homes at the Salton Sea, wikipedia stock photos.

With eclectic collections of horror stories and a Brammy in the bank for your first novel (yes, I´m looking at you, Scarecrow Gods) what was it that drew you to the good ol´ classic Zombie?

Zombies! Taste like chicken! Seriously, I’ve never been one to get too excited about tropes. The traditional monsters of horror seem to be done to death. Probably of the hundred or so stories I’ve had published, less than ten of them deal with vampires, zombies, werewolves and the like.
I’ve always been more of a dark fantasist; I like to create textured landscapes populated by real characters who I then put in improbable situations. I’ve tended to create my own themes, my own monsters, and my own horror elements. So writing zombies was something new for me.

But zombies have something going for them that all the other tropes do not; they are pop culture icons. I inhale pop culture and exhale satisfaction. I love the iconography of registered trademarks and consumer logos. I crave music and television and magazines. I’d sleep on a bed of TV channel guides if it would mean that I could by osmosis relive the first 50 episodes of Gilligan’s Island, Bewitched or I Dream of Jeanie.
Because of their post modern representation in the original Dawn of the Dead, zombies have become as much a piece of pop culture as the Golden Arches, delivery pizzas and over-priced coffee from teenage American baristas.

If I was ever going to do a trope it was always going to be a zombie.
Zombies are cool. Zombies are badass. Even better, zombies are so badass cool that they don’t even know they’re monsters.

Cover artwork for Weston Ochses' 'Empire of Salt', painted by Greg Staples. Click for horrible high-def version!

As an American, how did Abaddon, a publisher that´s as British as Fish `n´ Chips and 2000 AD, first appear on your radar? What attracted you to them as a potential publisher? Or more to the point, what exactly do they have on you?

What’s 2000 AD? Is that a motor oil? HA! Just kidding. Put down the knife. Seriously, the folks at Abaddon caught me pilfering nursery rhymes from a Grimms' Fairy Tales book and selling it to the Star Trek franchise as Klingon Fables. They also caught me coming out of a massage parlor in West Hollywood, where I was only asking for directions, I swear. The kicker was when I was filmed beating up a herd of Girl Scouts and stealing their cookies. With all the evidence against me, it was too easy for Abaddon to force me to pay them money and send them a kick-ass free zombie novel.

Seriously this time; I was first drawn to Abaddon when 'The Afterblight Chronicles' first began. I thought the idea was incredible. I still do and would love to work on the franchise. I communicated with Jonathan Oliver, editor-in-chief of Abaddon, during this time. We agreed that we’d like to work together sometime in the future, but couldn’t decide in what capacity. Then came 2008 and the Book Expo of America which took place in L.A. Abaddon had a space in the show and I took the time to drop by and say hello. Pretty soon, Abaddon reopened their submissions and were looking for some more zombie novels. I’d been thinking about doing one regarding the Salton Sea anyway, so this became the perfect opportunity to pitch the project. Jon loved it and here we are today, with me sitting here being interviewed about a zombie novel coming out from Abaddon with a super-kick-ass cover.

Apart from your award winning novel, you´ve also had great success with your `Backwoods Horror´ short stories. You obviously enjoy working in both forms. Do you have a preference?

For me the story decides the form. I was lucky starting out. I began writing short stories. Me and a fellow named David Whitman became household names in a very short time with our collection Scary Rednecks and Other Inbred Horrors. The collection garnered insane attention and outsold everything the then publisher, Darktales, had to offer. The stories in the collection inspired independent film projects and hearkened in a period of backwoods horror fiction in America that is only now beginning to slow down.

I still meet folks at conventions and book signings who bring copies of that old book, or the hard cover reprint from Delirium. Instead of what I’m working on now, they want to talk about those old stories and how much they meant to them. I still remember a reading I did at Horrorfind I in Baltimore. There must have been seventy five people in the room. I’d advertised that there would be cheese balls and beer and I didn’t lie. I went to the discount store and bought ten big bags of cheese balls. Then I went and bought 8 cases of the local brew, National Bohemian, or Natty Bo.
I passed out the beer and encouraged everyone to throw cheese balls during the reading. It was sheer and utter chaos with me reading at the top of my lungs. People still come and talk to me about that. What a blast that was; even more fun than the bass boat radio hour reading we had the following year. Ah, the good old days.

What is it about Horror as a genre that attracts you as a writer?

Funny thing about horror is that I never knew I was a horror author. In fact, the question is still up in the air. When I first started writing I was just an author. I wrote what I wanted. It wasn’t until I began to sell things that I was called a horror author. But then I sold my first novel, and although it won a Bram Stoker Award, I have it on record from several other publishers that it’s a dark fantasy novel. I’ve since pitched a few novels to agents and publishers only to have them come back and tell me that what I was pitching wasn’t horror, and it wasn’t science fiction, and it wasn’t fantasy, but instead, some kind of amalgam of all three. At that point I usually naively bat my eyelashes and ask, “So? Is there a problem with that?” As it turns out those sorts of novels are immensely popular, but because publishers have a hard time marketing them, they are few and far between.

So do I write horror? I think so. Do I write science fiction? Yes. What about fantasy? That too. I have two trilogies in the works right now. One is 'The Cycle of the Aegis' and is a combination of all three. Those books are immensely popular. In fact, I’m writing the final book now. The other trilogy is 'The Vampire Outlaw' trilogy, which is horror, adventure and space opera. This is also immensely popular. It’s what I want to write.
It’s what people want to read.

But you asked me what it was about horror that I like, didn’t you. I’ve always felt that horror is an emotion and it’s the manipulation of that emotion that makes horror good horror. Horror is about the psychology of fear, which gets to the very heart of characterization. There’s nothing better than to give a character something nice, then make them terrified they’ll lose it, whether it’s a Barbie Doll or their very lives...

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Stay tuned for the follow up to this interview, where we turn the tables and Weston interviews Pat about his forthcoming series!

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Memento Mori

Ninety-three years ago yesterday, the 13th Battalion of the Penine Fusiliers vanished without a trace from the Somme.

Who knows or dares to dream what became of them, where they went, or what they met there...?

Lest we forget.



No Man's World: Black Hand Gang by Pat Kelleher, due out in February next year.

David

Update Time!

Hi all,

Right, so two quick updates:

eBooks

Our hard-working assistant Jenni's been frantically working through our eBook back-catalogue, and now every Abaddon book released up to April this year is available from Mobipocket. There's also lots of the old Black Flame books set in the 2000AD universe, so crack on.

Upcoming Schedule

I'm proofing Matthew Sprange's second Lucius Kane book Twilight of Kerberos: Night's Haunting right now, so that's due out next month. Jon's book Twilight of Kerberos: The Call of Kerberos is due out in November as well, as the series draws ever closer to revealing the secrets of Twilight and the ever-present Kerberos, about the fate of the lost Old Races, and about the strange evil that lurks beneath the waves. Sorry for the delay with these books; as you will have seen in our press-release, we've just taken on a load of extra titles, and we're kind of running to catch up right now.

Fans of crown agent and dandy Ulysses Quicksilver will be thrilled to know that Jonathan Green's Pax Britannia: Blood Royal is due out on time in December. It's the perfect gift for the steampunkophile in your life but remember, a steam-powered centenarian senile cyborg queen is for life, not just for Christmas.

In January, we're still expecting to deliver Weston Ochse's coastal horror Tomes of the Dead: Empire of Salt. This is Weston's first book for us, and we're really looking forward to it. Aquatic zombies and bracing sea air; the perfect combination for a getaway.

February will see the release of Cold Warriors, Rebecca Levene's first instalment in our new horror-espionage setting The Infernal Game, and Pat Kelleher's Black Hand Gang, which will kick off our new WWI/sci-fi crossover No Man's World. These are both really intriguing settings, and I'm pretty excited about both of them.

Coming up, we have more Twilight, more Pax, Scott Andrews' third Afterblight book and, as always, more of those hungry, hungry zombies. Watch this space...

Good hunting,

David