Winners of Free Scotty Stuff

Sorry for the delay in posting the names of the winners; this weekend seemed to get away from me! Thank you to those that entered the drawing to win free Scotty stuff, and also a big thank you to everyone who didn't enter the drawing but still supported Nicholson during his recent book launch for Liquid Fear.

Winner of the first-place prize:

Candy's Creations


Winner of the second-place prize:

Capt. Murdock


Again, thank you to everyone who entered. Winners, please send me your mailing address to bookhound78 (at) live (dot) com. If I don't receive your information by April 12 I will draw a new winner for your prize.

Winner of THE GREEN DAWN

I don't have much time today, so I'm just going to cut to the chase. The winner of an e-copy of The Green Dawn by Justice and Wilbanks is...

Darkeva!!!

You have five days to contact me to claim your prize, at which time if it's unclaimed I will draw a new winner. Send me an e-mail to bookhound78 (at) live (dot) com and state which format (Kindle, Nook, etc.) you prefer.

Thanks to everyone for their comments and thanks to David for doing the interview!

William Meikle's Blog Crawl: An Interview

I'm honored that Bookhound's Den is a stop on William Meikle's Blog Crawl. Meikle is a prolific author, having ten novels published and over 130 stories published in twelve countries and eight languages. Meikle's writing is fun and imaginative, and while he is coined as a "pulp" writer, don't let that fool you. The man knows how to write and how to tell an intriguing story. I recently read and reviewed his novelette, Abominable, and loved it. I can't wait to tackle more from his immense collection of e-books he's had published. For more information about William Meikle, stop by his site.

Make sure you read to the end of the interview to enter for your chance to win Kindle—yes, I said a Kindle—filled with Meikle's e-books.

Question: Your work is less concerned with street and corporate crime than most other Scottish crime fiction. Have the recent boom years of police procedural, forensic science and Noir novels affected you as a writer of darker stories?

Answer: Only to the extent that everything is grist to the mill. I do read widely, both in the crime and horror genres, but my crime fiction in particular keeps returning to older, pulpier, bases. My series character, Glasgow PI Derek Adams, is a Bogart and Chandler fan, and it is the movies and Americana of the '40s that I find a lot of my inspiration for him, rather than in the modern procedural. Paradoxically, forensics and noir have affected my horror fiction more than my crime fiction, helped along by my background in Biological Science.
 
Question: In your work it is the atmosphere of danger as an impersonal presence that creates suspense. Is that harder to maintain than giving it a human form and having a detective investigate psychological motivation as a means of creating order from chaos?
 
Answer: I believe the opposite is true. A monster is often just that - monstrous, unknown and unknowable. Maintaining a distance from what people understand as real life is the hard bit, but no harder than trying to make readers understand a criminal/murderer whose thought patterns are far away from their own. As I said, a dark unknown is sometimes easier, as everyone has their own fears and phobias that they can project onto an unseen, impersonal presence.
 
Question: Your Watchers trilogy is written in the tradition of the Arthurian legend and your three books about Glasgow PI Derek Adams could be read as a tribute to Raymond Chandler. Ever since the opening scene of The Big Sleep Philip Marlowe and his disciples have been seen as latter day knights in shining armour. Seen in that light, is your genre transition less surprising than it might seem to some readers of traditional crime fiction?


Answer: It's all about the struggle of the dark against the light. The time and place, and the way it plays out is in some ways secondary to that. And when you're dealing with archetypes, there's only so many to go around, and it's not surprising that the same concepts of death and betrayal, love and loss, turn up wherever, and whenever, the story is placed.

Plus, there are antecedents - occult detectives who may seem to use the trappings of crime solvers, but get involved in the supernatural. William Hjortsberg's Falling Angel (the book that led to the movie Angel Heart) is a fine example, an expert blending of gumshoe and deviltry that is one of my favorite books. Likewise, in the movies, we have cops facing a demon in Denzel Washington's Fallen that plays like a police procedural taken to a very dark place.

And even further back, in the "gentleman detective" era, we have seekers of truth in occult cases in John Silence and Carnacki. Even Holmes himself came close to supernatural conclusions at times.

I've recently explored this for myself, in the Midnight Eye Files stories, in a series of Carnacki stories, and I even got a chance to have Holmes fight a Necromancer in Edinburgh in an anthology appearance in Gaslight Grotesque. It seems there is quite a market for this kind of merging of crime and supernatural, and I intend to write a lot more of it.


Question: Though the theme of darkness comes in strange and shifting shapes, the notion of a complex personality with one or more dark sides is comfortably at home in Scottish Gothic literature. Are you inspired by the works of James Hogg and Robert Louis Stevenson?
 
Answer: Stevenson in particular is a big influence. He is a master of plotting, and of putting innocents into situations far out of their usual comfort zones while still maintaining a grounding in their previous, calmer, reality. His way with a loveable rogue in Treasure Island and Kidnapped in particular is also a big influence. Other Scottish writers who have influenced me include John Buchan, Iain Banks and, more in my youth than now, Alistair MacLean and Nigel Tranter. From them I learned how to use the scope of both the Scottish landscape and its history while still keeping the characters alive.

Question: You have had over 130 stories published in eight languages and your fiction seems to sell abroad as well as at home. As for the success of your fellow Scottish crime writers, the reasons for their internationally acclaimed work might be a contemporary setting and local flavour. Where does your work find its widest audience?
 
Answer: I'd love to be better known in Scotland, but the sad truth is that the big markets are in the States, and that's where I find most of my readers. My readership is generally in the fantasy and horror fields, not really known as a big draw in Scotland. That said, I've sold several short crime stories to The Weekly News which is still widely read. My Grannies would have been proud of me.

Question: A writer with a shared interest in fantasy and horror fiction is Stephen King. After many experiments in various genres he seems to have most fun where his imagination finds the least number of formal restrictions. Is that the genre's appeal for you, too?
 
Answer: It's pulp fiction that interests me, and I find that it crosses many genres almost seamlessly. I rarely think about "genre" anyway. I write what I want to write and leave marketing labels to the publishers. That said, there -is- indeed a freedom in writing about the supernatural where, instead of having a man come in with a gun to get the scene moving, you can have any manner of things going on as long as you can explain them away to the reader's satisfaction. The verisimilitude matters though -- the reader has to -believe-, and that can be difficult to pull off.

************************
 
To enter for a chance to win a Kindle filled with William Meikle's e-books, simply leave a comment below. At the end of February Mr. Meikle will have a drawing from all eligible entries from his Blog Crawl (of which this post is one stop along the way). For more details, see Mr. Meikle's blog.

Winner of AS I EMBRACE MY JAGGED EDGES

First off, I want to thank Lee for being a great sport and writing a guest post for my blog. I really appreciate it! He's a great guy; make sure you check out his work! And second, thank you to everyone that stopped by and read/commented on Lee's post. I hope you'll come back later and find something useful around here.

Now, according to my count there were 12 comments eligible for a copy of Lee's e-book. I went to Random.org to generate a number for the winner. And that winner is...

Bec!!!

Contact me with your e-mail address you would like me to send the book to. If I don't hear anything within five days, I'll draw another name.

Make sure you stop by and check out tomorrow's guest...you'll be in for a treat!

A Very Scary Christmas

What’s the first thing you think of when you hear the word “Christmas”? I know for me it’s some good, old-fashioned, spine-tingling horror. I mean, what can be more frightening than the holidays? Fighting the crowds to buy some over-priced gift for someone who may or may not like it. An overweight guy in a red suit that knows everything you’re doing, whether you’re being naughty or nice. For goodness’ sake, he knows when you’re sleeping and when you’re awake. I don’t know, but if you ask me, this guy sounds a bit like a Peeping Tom. And let’s not even get started about all the “fun” that is had traveling during the holidays.

So in celebration of all the horror that occurs during this season, I’ve decided to have “A Very Scary Christmas” giveaway here at my blog. I’m not the most creative person when it comes to these contests and giveaways—plus I’m pretty busy during this time of year—so I’m going to make entering this contest a breeze. There are three possible ways for you to enter:

1. Leave a comment on my blog. You can comment on any post here, new or old. It doesn’t have to be anything insightful or profound, just leave a comment. You receive one entry for leaving a comment; feel free to comment as much as you want, but you only get one entry even if you leave 50 comments.

2. Become a follower of my blog. If you click on the little “Follow” button to the right and become a follower of my blog, you receive an entry for the contest. All current followers are automatically entered.

3. Re-tweet one of my tweets on Twitter about this contest. Again, feel free to re-tweet me 50 times, but you only get one entry for the giveaway.

You may get up to three entries for the drawing if you do each of the above things. The contest will be open for one week and will end on Tuesday, December 14th at 12:00 p.m. EST. At that time, all entries will be tallied and a drawing will be held, with my kids drawing names of the winners.

So, you may be asking, what are we drawing for? There will be a first and second place price, which I think you’ll like:

First place: Winner will receive five—yes, five—physical books. And these aren’t just any books; these are books by some of the most talented horror writers out there today: Vampyrrhic by Simon Clark, A Gathering of Crows by Brian Keene, Snow by Ronald Malfi, The Killing Kind by Bryan Smith, and Joyride by Jack Ketchum.

Second place: The second-place winner will receive a physical copy of The Regulators by Stephen King (writing as Richard Bachman).

All books are brand new and have not been read. Due to shipping costs, this contest is limited to U.S. addresses only. ***Winners will be announced here and via Twitter. You will have three days to claim your prize before another winner is selected.***

Good luck and have a horrible…er…I mean, wonderful holiday season!

"Real" Book Goodness

I just got home from the wake, er, closing sale of Books-A-Million in Raleigh, NC. Bought all kinds of goodies for cheap. It was a little weird pulling away from the store and knowing it would be the last time that I did that. I wasn't sad, really, but I did feel kind of strange. I'm excited about my new-found love for e-books, but I will miss the days that I lounged around in the cafe of BAM spending time reading, drinking coffee and lattes, and surfing the web. Hopefully, there will be some indie places that pop-up around here to serve as a social gathering place for people to share their love and passion for literature.

But something good will come from all this for you. Yes, I said you. I picked up a bunch of books that I'm going to share with you in the upcoming days and weeks, through contests and giveaways. Not sure exactly what I'm going to do yet, but it'll be easy and fairly effortless for you. Just make sure you stayed tuned for your chance to win stuff from authors such as Keene, Ketchum, Smith, Nicholson, Follett, Rand, and others!