Advent. Day 20. Mrs Claus faces Rudolf across a table strewn with half-chewed carrots and maps of the North Pole. The rebel leader’s red nose is still blistered from the Massive Cracker Incident.
‘I can’t forgive him,’ said Rudolf. ‘Not after all he’s done. Not after the Cracker, and the exploding baubles, and all he’s put my boys through. I just… I just can’t.’
Mrs Claus produces a bundle from under her cloak. Rudolf’s guards flinch, but he waves them off. Mrs Claus would never hurt him.
‘Would this help?’
And there, on the table, is Mrs Claus’s Christmas Ham, a mighty peace offering if ever there was one. Her very own piece of lovingly roasted pig, from her own table: the Ham of Santa, no less…
*
What’s this? Another Advent competition? Yes! That’s right! Win an exclusive, super-rare Advanced Reader Copy of Christopher Fowler’s smash hit of 2015 The Sand Men!
All you need to do is email rob.power@rebellion.co.uk with the subject heading SANDY MALES and we’ll take care of the rest. Good luck!
18 December – a week to Christmas, and in the North Pole barely a present has been wrapped. All across the world, children count down the days unaware that Santa the Generous is waging a bitter war against his very own reindeer.
Rudolf and his followers are reeling in the wake of what has rapidly become known as the Massive Cracker Incident. An enormous paper crown lies in shreds in No Elf’s Land. The war, it seems, will not be over by Christmas.
In the Claus Compound, Santa the Benevolent has found the sherry Mrs Claus so diligently hid, and has shared it out among his men. They are all drunk as merry little festive lords.
Little do they know, but Mrs Claus has a plan of her own to bring the Santa Wars to an end…
*
What has Mrs Claus got up her festively-themed sleeve, we wonder? Is it, perhaps, a huge sale on all Christopher Fowler eBooks in the Rebellion Store? By jove, we think it is!
Head over to our Store now and grab yourself a bargain. And be quick, because this sale won’t last long!
It’s Super Thursday* and we’re wading into the fray with a big hitter of our very own: The Sand Men, a bold new thriller from bestseller Christopher Fowler, is out today, and we couldn’t be happier.
By now you’ve probably seen our lush cover art, and read all about this JG Ballard influenced slice of near-future fiction, set in the deady dunes of Dubai.
If not, well, we’re here to help. Chris has been doing a few interviews about this frankly brilliant new book at the following blogs:
Finally, don’t forget to come along to Forbidden Planet on Shaftesbury Avenue next Thursay night from 6pm, to get your copies of The Sand Men signed by Mr Fowler himself. You can find details on Facebook or over at the official Forbidden Planet website.
*The day when the publishing industry throws a collective fit and publishes roughly four million new books in advance of the Christmas rush….
Christopher Fowler’s The Sand Men is out this week, and boy are we exctied.
A five-minutes-into-the-future thriller set in Dubai, this is a slice of Ballardian fiction that demonstrates the formidable talent of an author at the peak of his powers. Although, to be fair, we are a little biased…
To celebrate the release of The Sand Men, the author is going to be appearaing at a signing in London next week. You can join Christopher from 6pm-7pm on Thursday 15 October at the Forbidden Planet Superstore, 179 Shaftesbury Avenue, London, and get your copy of The Sand Men signed up a good ‘un.
And do feel free to let us know you’re coming along by checking on the Facebook event page.
Christopher Fowler is a writer who knows a thing or two about giving us the sort of chills that stay with us for days.
Plastic is a book about money, mayhem and all manner of madness, and – believe it or not – you can snap it up in eBook format for only 99p all weekend! Hooray!
We take a stroll between the sand and the clear blue sky with Chris Fowler’s latest outing for Solaris, The Sand Men.
Set among the glittering skyscrapers and deadly dunes of Dubai, The Sand Men transports us to a future that’s five minutes away, where rebellion against conformity can lead to the unthinkable…
“I spent two years researching ‘The Sand Men’, my homage to JG Ballard, set in Dubai’s new world of high-end, high-luxury resorts for the super-rich,” says Fowler. “But at what price to everyone else? The stunning cover perfectly sums up the feel and tone of the thriller, which encapsulates all of the themes I’ve been exploring in recent years.”
Set in a world of cruel juxtapositions where underpaid manual labourers slave over grandiloquent palaces for the world’s 1%; where nature is subverted to create a futuristic world in which manicured lawns meet dry desert dunes; and where a man can accidentally freeze to death on burning hot sand…
The Sand Men is a twisted Ballardian tale set in a world of uncertainties and paranoia, is a new style of thriller from the ever-popular author of the Bryant & May series.
And as is befitting a book this special, we’ve pulled out all the stops with our cover…
The Sand Men is coming from Solaris in October 2015.
In the Christopher Fowler’s chilling new novel Nyctophobia he addresses one of humanity’s oldest, and most primeval fears: darkness.
“It’s a strange thing, nyctophobia. You’re not born with it. It can start at any time. It comes and goes, and it’s one of the only phobias you can transmit to other people.”
In anticipation of the book’s release I sat down with some of the Solaris publishing team and in a badly thought out form of group therapy got them to reveal what keeps them awake at night…
Jonathan Oliver, Editor-in-Chief
As with so many things, you can blame it on TV. Well, you can blame it on one specific TV show that I saw around Christmastime when I was 6 years old: The Box of Delights. Yes, The Box of Delights for a time gave me a phobia of wolves. I blame the opening title sequence with that grinning wolf’s head; that haunted my dreams for years afterward. I would wake from a nightmare where a man in a suit with a wolf’s head was standing in my bedroom doorway. It’s certainly a silly thing to be afraid of, especially living in the UK where there aren’t that many wolves around. But the surreality of the wolf imagery in that old BBC show probably exacerbated the fear. For a while I found werewolf movies scarier than they probably were intended to be, and even images of wolves in documentaries gave me a frisson of fear.
No longer, however; I’ve grown out of it. There are much more horrible things to be scared of as an adult. Ali – my wife – and I recently revisited The Box of Delights, watching the BBC adaptation. It’s still quite weird, but it’s showing its age, and it’s particularly sad to watch Robert Stephens put in a lacklustre performance, clearly unwell, clearly suffering from the ravages of addiction.
Children take images and turn them into something way more sinister thanks to the power of imagination, and in the winter of 1984, and for several years afterwards, for this young boy, the wolves were running.
Ben Smith, Publishing Manager
Who needs a phobia when you have experienced real, rational terror? My brothers and I were going to see Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark at the cinema, but when we got there it was sold out. However my mum – normally a careful, caring woman – spotted another movie that had Spielberg’s name on the poster and got us tickets to that instead. The movie was Poltergeist. I was six years old.
I had nightmares FOR YEARS.
So no, I have no phobias.
But if a television set comes on by itself, let’s just say I’m not staying in the building.
David Moore, Editor
My phobias – although I’d hesitate to call either of them phobias, for different reasons – are spiders (sort of) and heights.
I hesitate to consider my discomfort with spiders a phobia, since phobias (phobiae?) are irrational, and – frankly – I grew up in Australia. Spiders over there will fuck your shit up. I don’t scream, scarper, freeze or any of that nonsense; my response can generally be classed under “unrestrained bloody carnage.” Man, fuck those things. I actually like spiders – they’re beautiful, fascinating, extraordinary creatures – but if I see one of the fuckers in my house it gets the shoe.
Vertigo is an odd one. As a kid, like most kids, I scampered up and down climbing frames, trees and all sorts left, right and centre. I don’t even have a trauma to refer to, or remember developing vertigo; it crept up on me over the years. I think when we stop climbing stuff, we lose the nerve to do it. The weird thing about vertigo is, it’s almost more physical than anything else. Rationally, I can look over a balcony or down from the London Eye very calmly, knowing I’m perfectly safe. But if whatever I’m standing on and holding onto isn’t obviously, visibly, very secure, my legs start to tense, my knees tingle, my back tenses – everything, in fact, starts to react except my mind. It’s weird.
So I guess my greatest fear would be falling from a great height into a nest of spiders. Or falling off a big spider or something, I dunno.
Lydia Gittins, Digital Promotions & PR Assistant
Needles. Even just writing the word makes me feel anxious.
In theory this is a totally logical fear; it’s letting someone deliberately insert a foreign object THROUGH YOUR SKIN.
Sadly though, as someone with multiple piercings when I present this phobia (normally in the context of a busy doctor’s surgery, to an over-worked nurse and via the medium of the ‘dead faint’) it somehow gets a little harder to rationalise to other people and a lot harder to sympathise with…
So basically, don’t come anywhere near me with a needle, unless you’re covered in poorly thought-out tattoos and work in a dubious piercing salon.
Oh, also morph suits. I bloody hate morph suits.
Simon Parr, Head of Art and cover artist for Nyctophobia
I FEAR NO MAN
(except for Hulk Hogan)
Ed: The image used for Simon’s phobia is the one supplied by him with his statement. It has also directly contributed to a more general office-wide fear of the Hogan-infinity-beard. Thanks Simon.
Nyctophobia by Christopher Fowler is out October 2014
