In Japan, Hell’s Horizon is published in hardback, with a dustcover jacket. If you take off the dustcover jacket, you find this gorgeous image on the inside hard cover. I’ll have to check the Japanese edition of book 1 when I take it out of storage, in case that features a secret interior cover too!!!!
This is the American artist’s first stab at the front cover and wraparound cover (i.e. the front, spine and back) for Hell’s Horizon, book 2 of The City. I think it looks stunning even as it is, so I don’t imagine it will require much tinkering with!! We’ll all be able to check and compare later in the year when the final image is approved…
This is the cover for the Japanese edition of Hell’s Horizon, the second book of The City.
This is the cover for the American ARC of Procession of the Dead. An ARC is an Advance Reading Copy (also known as a “proof”), made to be distributed among reviewers, librarians and people like that a few months ahead of a book’s release. ARCs are usually quite difficult to find if you don’t have any industry connections, since they’re not supposed to be sold, but they sometimes pop up on eBay or other sites which specialise in books.
Many writers who work on a series have a “bible” which lists all of the characters, what they look like, their traits, what they have done in each book, along with lots more info about the world of the series, such as place names, major and minor events, etc. I don’t — I prefer to fly by the seat of my pants!!!
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I began work on City of the Snakes on the 7th of June 2000. I completed my final edit on the 22nd of November 2009, so the book took almost nine and a half years to complete. Which was pretty short for one of my City books!!! Although, having said that, the book DID “cannibalize” an earlier, unfinished book of mine, a book about a vigilantee in London which I had tried to write when I was a teenager. I only got a handful of chapters or so into the story before realizing I had bitten off more than I could chew and putting it aside. But I remembered it years later and worked in some of the themes, including a particularly juicy scene involving rape with a dildo, which I recycled and included in the new book!! So, in a way, you can go back about 20 years to its “true” start!!!!!
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‘Crime with a difference’ would perhaps be an appropriate genre classification for D.B. Shan’s second adult novel, Hell’s Horizon. What begins as a fairly standard (albeit noirish) whodunnit soon evolves into a strange beast of a book, suspended somewhere between crime, horror and fantasy. Like its predecessor, Procession of the Dead, it drops only subtle hints at first of its own supernatural undercurrents, preferring to focus on sketching the bleak and bloodstained setting on which the action thrives. When the magic does hit, it can seem a little incongruous, but it certainly transforms this witches’ brew into something intriguingly unique. The prequel is a must-read before attempting this latest instalment; anybody unfamiliar with the mechanics of Ayuamarcans will probably be left scratching their head and wanting their money back.
Shan’s writing is as brutal as it is atmospheric. He offers little relief from the violence of his story, focusing as usual on the decay of his protagonist. The scene with the Fursts – a particularly memorable moment – is delivered so swiftly that it takes several pages to fully sink in, at which point the reader cannot help but feel slightly sick. Bleak though it may be, it is an undeniably skilful blow. I certainly found myself glancing behind my chair a few times while reading at night; I’ll give Shan credit for that.
Nevertheless, like its predecessor, this book does suffer somewhat from being difficult to endure. Nobody will guess all of Shan’s plot twists, and that may be partly because his plot is wildly unpredictable – but it will also be partly because his readers are too benumbed to make any reasonable attempts. This instalment falls a step short of Procession in the engrossing, page-turning department, and the slower-paced moments leave plenty of time for noticing that the prose is not the best in the world. To make matters worse, Shan has arguably overstepped the mark when it comes to his most intriguing characters – The Cardinal and Paucar Wami – neatly shattering the reverent atmospheres that previously made them such powerful narrative lures.
At the very least, Hell’s Horizon is an exceptionally plotted whodunnit. The twists and turns are breathtakingly complex. But how to become desensitised to the violence without becoming desensitised to the whole lot? That’s a question for a hardier reader than myself.
http://samuelsreadingchair.blogspot.com/2009/09/hells-horizon-db-shan.html
