Coming soon: HOUSE OF THE RAIN KING
Big news today! After three years of work, I'm finally ready to share my first novel with you all.
HOUSE OF THE RAIN KING is a standalone fantasy novel. It's the story of a young monk struggling to uncover his god's true history, amidst the rising waters of a mythic flood. It's inspired by classic works of fantasy such as Mervyn Peake's Gormenghast and Ursula Le Guin's The Tombs of Atuan, as well as more modern titles like Piranesi and The Spear Cuts Through Water.
If you're curious to learn more, you can read the blurb on my website. If you're really curious, keep reading to see how you can get a free advance copy.
The blurb is (hopefully) well tuned to sell the book to someone who doesn't know me at all. But since you're a Paperback Picnic subscriber, we're already somewhat acquainted, so let me tell you a bit more about it in straightforward terms.
What is House of the Rain King about? Well, it's a story about a young monk, Emwort, whose life is bound up in ritual and prophecy. When Emwort's god, the Rain King, arrives in person, it fulfills certain aspects of this ritual-world while throwing others into chaos.
The other half of the story is about Sparrow Company, a band of wandering mercenaries. They're sworn to serve the Rain King, but only so they can get paid. As the truth about the Rain King emerges, Emwort and the Sparrows will come together and face a terrible decision that will shape both their futures.
This tension, between monks and mercenaries, between the transcendent and the mundane, is at the heart of the book. It's a book with gods and fairies and bird-people, but it's also a book where material things matter. Where the rain-damage on a sheet of paper can be as important as a mythic prophecy written in the earth. While I was writing, I often pitched it in my head as "The Black Company comes to Gormenghast". (Once I started learning about marketing, I realised this was a poor pitch because not that many people know those books anymore. But if you're reading this blog, you probably do.)
House of the Rain King is also a love letter to the Australian landscape. It's set in a secondary world, but the plants, animals and birds, which play a big role in the story, are all taken directly from the land on which I live.
This aspect is a big part of my decision to publish independently. The prevailing wisdom in fantasy publishing is that American readers don't want to read Australian voices. It confuses them, apparently. This is why Australia can produce great fantasy authors like Garth Nix and Isobelle Carmody, but they rarely write about the continent they call home, instead focusing on traditional pseudo-European settings.
I believe that conventional wisdom is wrong and there are readers out there who will love the unique touch that my Australian-ness brings to the fantasy genre.
But the only way to find out for sure is to publish the book.
How you can read the book before it comes out
If all goes well, the novel should launch by the end of February. But if you want to get your hands on it earlier, I have a limited number of ARCs (Advance Review Copies) to give away. Basically, this means you get a free copy of the ebook in exchange for posting an honest review when the novel is released. If you're interested, fill out the form here:
I have 10 copies to give away, and they should go out in the next couple of weeks.
I'll also be promoting the book intermittently on this blog over the next few months. But I don't want to spam you with this stuff if you're just here for the book reviews. So what I'm going to do is a series of posts on the classic novels that influenced me. It'll be 90% Paperback Picnic content, 10% nudging you toward my novel. This will have the added bonus of allowing me to talk about some of my favourite classic authors, such as Mervyn Peake, Ursula Le Guin, Jack Vance and Glen Cook, who I haven't previously covered here.
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