Stuck In A RUT

I met Scott Phillips in a bar in Philly. Seriously annoying dude: laidback, cool, generous with his time, all that. And everyone kept raving about how good a writer he was. So I bought one of his books - THE ICE HARVEST - and took it back to the hotel room and gave it ten pages, just to see. Round about 4 am, and halfway through, I finally put it down.
  Woke up the next morning, said, ‘Okay, you’d had a few beers last night, it’s probably not as good as you remember it.’ It was, and better.
  Later that week, at the Baltimore B’con, I bumped into Scott Phillips twice. Both times he was walking around with THE BIG O tucked under his oxter. Nice guy.
  A couple of months later, I read COTTONWOOD. Better than THE ICE HARVEST? Possibly, but we’re dealing in quarks here.
  Anyway, the news that the Concord Free Press is publishing Scott Phillips’ new offering is all kinds of good news. To wit:

RUT, a wild and original novel from Scott Phillips, takes readers to the Rocky Mountains circa 2050, where the once thriving burg of Gower is about to become a 21st-century ghost town. Thanks to extreme weather and plenty of toxic waste, the skiers and celebrities are gone, along with the money and the veneer of civilization. What’s left? Old-time religion and brand-new pharmaceuticals, bad food and warm beer, mutated animals and small-town gossip. Can the town survive? We’ll see.

“Part of me would love to live in the near-future world Scott Phillips has imagined in RUT, but only a little part. The rest of me is happy just to read about this, um, direction in which we humans might be headed. Another great novel from one of our best.”
—Tom Franklin, author of CROOKED LETTER, CROOKED LETTER

  A dystopian novel with a difference, RUT is hilarious and horrifying. Phillips creates a richly imagined world that serves as a funhouse mirror for our own times. It’s filled with an unforgettable cast of spot on original characters who struggle, steal, lie, fight, drink, cheat, and scheme their way to better days. Or China. Or anywhere but Gower. Sly and cool, absurd and archly perceptive, RUT resonates with the best work of Kurt Vonnegut and Thomas Pynchon, all in a wonderfully weird tale unlike any other.

  A Phillips / Vonnegut / Pynchon mash-up? I WANT IT NOW!
  Incidentally, if you haven’t come across the Concord Free Press before, they’re well worth checking out. The slogan: ‘Free their books and their minds will follow.’ Their mission statement reads thusly:

We publish great books and give them away. All we ask is that you make a voluntary donation to a charity or someone in need. Tell us about it. Then pass your book along so others can give. It’s a new kind of publishing, one based purely on generosity, and it’s changing the way people think about books.

  For the rest, clickety-click here …

Great Scott; and, A Cannes-Do Attitude

I’ve mentioned before in these pages that I’m a fan of Scott Phillips (right), and that THE ICE HARVEST was one of the finest books I read last year, of any type or stripe. Anyway, Scott was one of the writers I picked (on) to send a manuscript of The Novel Formerly Known As A GONZO NOIR (we’re calling it BAD FOR GOOD from here on in), and he got back to me yesterday with this:

“BAD FOR GOOD is a harrowing and yet hilarious examination of the gradual disintegration of a writer’s personality, as well as a damned fine noir novel about an evil hospital orderly and his even more evil twin orderly. Burke has outdone himself this time; it’s a hell of a read.” – Scott Phillips, author of THE ICE HARVEST

  Which is all kinds of nice. But then, after meeting him at the Baltimore Bouchercon, Scott Phillips was all kinds of nice too. I picked up a copy of his COTTONWOOD in a second-hand bookshop last week, it being impossible to get first-hand here in Ireland, and I’ve tucked it away with two or three others for my holiday reading next month. Because you know how it is – with space and time so short, you don’t want to bring any dud books on holidays, you want to know the books you have with you will deliver …
  Anyway, the story with TNFKAAGN / BFG is that it went out to some publishers late last week, so if you have any spare chickens lying around, and a predilection for the occasional outbreak of voodoo, this would be a good time to start sacrificing livestock and rattling dem bones and whatnot …
  In other news, I received a rather intriguing text message last Sunday morning, which ran in its entirety thusly: “Hi Declan. In Cannes reading books and scripts. Loving THE BIG O. Who has the film rights? You?”
  Now that’s what I call a Cannes-do attitude. And then I awoke from a feverish dream and … Actually, no. I really did get that message. All the way from Cannes. I know the guy – obviously, or he wouldn’t have my phone number – but he really is a commissioning editor with a film production company. Which is nice.
  Incidentally, I’m sure other writers get the kind of vibe that runs along the lines of, “Hey, I read your book, it was really cinematic.” Like the biggest compliment you can pay a book is that it reads like a movie. I usually say, “I know, I wrote it that way.” And they go, “Really?” And you think, God, why wasn’t I born with a sick compulsion to stack supermarket shelves instead?

Nice-Nice Baby

One of the many cool things about Wednesday night's Noir at the Bar at Fergie's in Philly (yep, I'm only a week in the States and already I've gone native) was meeting Scott Phillips (right). I didn't realise that at the time, because at that point I'd never come across Scott Phillips' novel THE ICE HARVEST. Greg Gillespie of Port Richmond Books came to Fergie's and brought a crew along, which was also very cool, and told me that THE ICE HARVEST was a terrific novel. Okay, I'm thinking, yeah, maybe it is, although I hate it when someone praises a book too highly - I think I have an in-built resistance to being snowed that way. Anyway, with Scott having made the effort to come along to Fergie's, I bought a copy and had him sign it. Back at the hotel that night, a little worse for wear, I flipped open the first page just to get a feel for it ... Sixty pages later it's 3am and I'm thinking, this is so good I don't want to finish it all in one go. Truly wonderful stuff, with a deliciously light and deadpan style, it's a marvellous character study. I highly recommend it. Apparently there's a movie of the novel, starring John Cusack and Billy Bob Thornton, and I don't know how that one slipped under the radar ... But the best news I've heard all weekend is that there's a follow-up to THE ICE HARVEST, called THE WALKAWAY. Happy days, people.