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Post by chrismorey on Mar 13, 2012 15:56:29 GMT -6
 The novel Crustaceans by William Meikle is now available on the DarkRegions.com website in a Deluxe Signed Hardcover and a Trade Paperback edition (first 100 copies signed by the author). The book is already in stock and shipping to customers.Click here to read more about Crustaceans by William MeikleFrom Scottish writer William Meikle comes a novel that is a welcome return to those tomes of pure enjoyment that we read with guilt in our early teens, in the tradition of James Herbert’s THE RATS and Guy N. Smith’s NIGHT OF THE CRABS. It begins with a dead whale on a Boston shoreline--not in itself an unusual occurrence. But the things that claw their way out of the blubber are very unusual indeed. A cast of giant crabs, evolved over centuries, descends on a small coastal town and, having feasted, make their way to the city using the sewer system. Soon they are swarming around Manhattan, hunted and harried by a SWAT team tasked with ridding the city of the menace...before the menace gets big enough to rid itself of the city. About the Author William Meikle is a Scottish writer with over a dozen novels published in the genre press and over 200 short story credits in thirteen countries. He is the author of the ongoing Midnight Eye series among others, and his work appears in a number of professional anthologies. His ebook THE INVASION has been as high as #2 in the Kindle SF charts. He lives in a remote corner of Newfoundland with icebergs, whales and bald eagles for company. In the winters he gets warm vicariously through the lives of others in cyberspace, so please check him out at www.williammeikle.comRead more...Publisher Dark Regions Press P.O. Box 1264 Colusa, CA, 95932 support AT darkregions.com www.darkregions.com |
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Post by williemeikle on Mar 13, 2012 17:33:13 GMT -6
Big beasties fascinate me
Some of that fascination stems from early film viewing. I remember being taken to the cinema to see The Blob. I couldn't have been more than seven or eight, and it scared the crap out of me. The original incarnation of Kong has been with me since around the same time. Similarly, I remember the BBC showing re-runs of classic creature features late on Friday nights, and THEM! in particular left a mark on my psyche. I've also got a Biological Sciences degree, and even while watching said movies, I'm usually trying to figure out how the creature would actually work in nature -- what would it eat? How would it procreate? What effect would it have on the environment around it?
On top of that, I have an interest in cryptozoology, of creatures that live just out of sight of humankind, and of the myriad possibilities that nature, and man's dabbling with it, can throw up.
Then there's Guy N Smith, who the book is dedicated to. Guy's killer crabs are remorseless, relentless and the kind of killing machine you can't help but love.
All those things were going round in my head when I first sat down to write the short novel Crustaceans.
As I started I only knew one or two things -- that there would be whales involved somewhere, and that the Crabs would be in the tunnels and sewers under the city. After some fascinating research into the history of excavations and tunneling I made a start.
I worked out a full ecological profile and lifecycle for my "beasts" but most of that went by the board as the plot took over. It went quickly, and I found myself enjoying it immensely. It runs in my head like a movie, and I'd love to see it on the big screen one day, or as a comic book. That's how I think of it -- big, brash and bloody.
It's definitely horror, but it's also Science-fiction, in a very 1950's B-Movie kind of way, a creature-feature if you like. It runs in my head like one of those lurid early technicolor monster movies, and readers will have fun thinking of it that way themselves.
Back to Guy N Smith again. This book began life as a possible collaboration with Guy which, for several reasons, didn't pan out. But the Crabs are all his, and without his original books, this one would never exist. (Indeed there are a few allusions in the book to the originals, a wee homage on my part.) I'd just like to thank Guy, for the inspiration and, more than that, for the fun he's given us in his books over his years of writing.
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