I couldn't even afford to visit Mr Clarke's lovely Sri Lankan hideaway, Mrs Grandma.
Should be getting some sales figures in the next couple of weeks. I expect them to be modest - couple of hundred copies, probably. Such are the perils of small press publishing when they don't have a marketing department or money to spend on advertisements or, even, cocaine.
Did garner some decent reviews, though, apart from the SFX one (which I still managed to salvage a quote from). Highlights here:
"An intriguing psychological thriller"
-Sam Wostear, The Sun
"This walk on the weird side is a well-crafted and highly enjoyable page-turner, written with a light touch and a distinctly dark heart."
-Yorkshire Post
"A dark, engrossing tale full of shrewd observation, sly humour and is the product of what must be a genuinely brilliant skewed imagination"
-Joolz Denby, Telegraph & Argus, Bradford
"Highly recommended high strangeness - 10/10"
-The Fortean Times
"A dark, funny and kaleidoscopic search for answers, written with lavish originality and page-turning passion. An undoubted cult in the making."
-The Gazette, Blackpool
"A tender, relevant anti-fantasy that doesn't trip on its own hipness and comes off like an alien abduction party."
-Bob Keery, Interzone magazine
"Hinterland is an insidious black magic spell of a book. Long after you’ve read it the story stays with you and imprints itself on the world around you"
-AOL.com Books
"The novel’s strength - to veer from the ordinary to the extraordinary so seamlessly - is gradually unsettling and the bemusement and uncertainty that it throws up is ultimately deeply poignant and not a little troubling."
-The Big Issue
"Hinterland should be perfect for SFX readers…David Barnett’s book has many parallels with Grant Morrison’s Invisibles series"
-SFX magazine
It was cult what that man said up there, by the way.
Since it came out, I signed with an agent (the lovely John Jarrold) who is trying to sell my second novel, Angelglass, at the moment. But no-one likes it. Well, not strictly true; some people did like it, they just don't want to publish it.
There have, however, been interested murmurs from, variously, some Yanqui publishers, a Russian publisher (!) and an independent film company from the States (double !)
Currently about 65,000 words into novel number three which my agent has seen the bulk of and shown around and which is actually eliciting more positive noises than the second book. Ain't it always the case?
Also been busy with some short story writing. Postscripts magazine has just bought my piece The End of the World Show, about every single apocalypse you can probably imagine (including meteors, giant lizards in Tokyo and the dead rising from the grave) by way of Coronation Street.
Visionary Tongue will be publishing a little tale called It's Nice But I Wouldn't Want To Die Here, in which the word "cock" is somewhat overused, in retrospect.
A story called Go, about a girl meeting the ghost of Jack Kerouac on the docks at Liverpool is to be published this Spring in an anthology titled You Are Here, from Redbeck Press.
And apart from a few shorts I'm waiting on, that's about it. Oh, I've also got my agent to send a copy of Hinterland to Kudos TV, who make Life On Mars. |
