9/06/2008

N Is Here

Right now I'm waiting on the final edits on Nova War (I'm pretty much resigned to that being the title of the next one) to come through the post, and meanwhile working on the third Dakota Merrick book, which is flowing suspiciously quickly - about twenty thousand words in already. I'm sure I'll stumble screaming into one of those familiar bottomless authorial potholes before very long.

Talking of stumbling screaming, if you like scary stories you should really check out N Is Here, both a book trailer and a full-length animated adaptation of a short story from Stephen King's collection coming out later this year. I can leave King more often than I can take him, but the fact is he doesn't mess about when it comes to frightening the crap out of you.

I've been down on book trailers in the past, and I think with good reason; most of them are awful. The one exception up until now was the one for Jeff Carlson's Plague Year, which was professional, polished and, I'm guessing, not cheap either. It didn't embarrass the author and it was witty and entertaining. N Is Here is the sign of book trailers moving into the big leagues, and it's much more than just a trailer. It's Hollywood-polished, slick, tight and, most especially, quite scary. It's a solid work in its own right, and I'd really like to see more trailers and short movies making use of what is a very simple yet very, very effective style of animation.

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