My new novella Devouring Milo will be out on July 14th. It asks the question, "What if a serial killer was attacked by a werewolf." Maybe it is a question that shouldn't have been asked, but my twin sister asked it anyways. It was her idea, after all. She worked up the first couple of pages, and handed it off to me. I liked the idea and ran with it. On July 14th you get to read the result.
Meanwhile, I have asked a few talented folks I know if they would mind entertaining you folks until the release date. Some of them said yes, and what the others said I won't repeat. Some of the posts will be about killers, some about werewolves, and some about whatever the hell comes up.
Without further ado, here is our first guest post from my good friend and fellow devious mind at Dynamic Ram Audio Productions, Chris Barnes. Take it away, Chris!
A Wolf in Ram's Clothing
by Chris Barnes
Over at Dynamic Ram
Audio Productions we love a bit of horror. Vampires, Zombies and the
like have been a staple of our literary diet for quite sometime, so
when we got the opportunity to adapt HIGH MOOR, GRAEME REYNOLDS opus
to the Werewolf legend, we howled at the moon in anticipation of the
hunt.
The Latin, “Lupis
Humanis” or “Wolfman” is one of the oldest supernatural legends
around, given that is even has a Latin name, so we knew that taking
this gritty novel and giving it added bite was
going to be a challenge.
Without giving too much
away about the actual plot:
A town in the North East of England is stalked by an unseen beast, Fields of mutilated sheep and a dead boy spark an investigation that will take Police Sergeant Stephen Wilkinson to the very edge of his sanity.
For now, that’s as
much as I’m prepared to give you, don’t worry there’s a trailer
at the end. For now keep reading, I’ll know if you skipped,
there’s a test at the end!
One of the main
challenges with this adaptation, aside from the usual narrators woes
like peace and quiet, was the local dialect. Being Scottish, North
East England voices are quite tricky to get your tongue around, so,
to try and get the voices to sound as natural as possible I had to do
my homework, as all good narrators should.
I started off by
listening to Graeme’s reading of a short he wrote called “One of
those Things”, by the Sixth or Seventh time round, I was beginning
to get the gist of it and started reading along parrot style, like
Linguaphone for Actors!
Again, without giving
too much away, there's a travelers camp in the mix, and for those
voices, I took a leaf from Ian McShane’s voice for Mr Bobinski from
the Coraline movie by Neil Gaiman, as they have an Eastern European
flavour.
Everyone else got
voices as they came to me whilst reading. I’m seat-of-your-pants
like that.
We are now about 90% of
the way through the read at the moment, once the read is complete the
post production process will begin in earnest and I will become a
nocturnal creature, stalking my prey and reveling in the chase for
the prize, a completed book for you all to enjoy.
One of the things that
has enthralled me about this book, is the sense of nostalgia it
garners in me, having grown up in the 80’s. I had similar
childhood experiences of bullying as the kids in the novel did, I
went to the corner shop for milk and sweets, even my beloved ZX
Spectrum computer gets a mention within it’s pages. I didn’t
however, get attacked by werewolves….
Graeme doesn’t flinch
when dealing with difficult subject matter, particularly the
disciplining of two of the kids by their alcoholic father, yet he
also manages not to allegorise his point. It’s up to the reader to
have their own opinion, rather than have Graemes’ thrust upon them,
no mean feat in and of itself.
I shall end this the
way I started, with some Latin.
High Moor – It’s
definitely a Canis Canem Edit world out there….
Listen to the trailer
here https://soundcloud.com/chris-
High Moor by GraemeReynolds and Read by Chris Barnes will be coming soon and will be
available from Audible, Itunes and Amazon Summer 2013.
****
Chris Barnes is owner of Dynamic Ram Audio Productions who specialize in bringing the best in independent audiobooks to life.He lives in Scotland with his wife Julie, four children, a dog, a cat and the kitchen sink.
You can find more about him at www.dynamic-ram.co.uk