"Question for the hive mind: it's the apocalypse. You need to drive from this place to that place without getting killed by zombies/werewolves/kaiju/whatever.
What car do you drive/steal/hijack?"
In case you're wondering what project that information was intended for, it's for my new book, Devil's Road, coming out at the beginning of March 2020. I made good use of most if not all of the suggestions as to what vehicles might be used to get through a deadly and dangerous environment.
Devils Road is a short novel that draws inspiration both from the novels I read in the 1970s and 1980s as well as cinema from that period, particularly Roger Zelazny's Damnation Alley, Roger Corman's Death Race 2000 and various dimly recalled Godzilla movies with actors in rubber costumes stamping around papier-mâché models of Tokyo.
If the person asking me what it's like is under forty, I tell them it's Pacific Rim meets Fast and Furious. If they're over forty, I tell them it's Death Race 2000 meets Godzilla.
The protagonist, Dutch McGuire, is a former refugee turned car thief turned participant in the world's most dangerous road race. Her character contains traces of the DNA both of Damnation Alley's Hell Tanner and Escape from New York's Snake Plissken.
Needless to say, it was a lot of fun to write. Here's the synopsis:
Nobody has taken part in the Devil’s Run annual road race as often as Dutch McGuire and lived to tell the tale. The racecourse circumnavigates the post-apocalyptic ruins of Teijouan, and with a choice between being eaten by the monstrous Kaiju that prowl the island’s devastated cities or murdered by her fellow racers, the odds against surviving another Run, let alone winning it, are slim.
Dutch doesn’t care about the odds nearly so much as she cares about getting back behind the wheel of her beloved Ford Falcon—except for one problem: she’s spent the last five years incarcerated in a high-security prison for her part in a heist.
So when a crooked billionaire offers to put her back in the race on condition she uses it as cover for a secret retrieval operation, she can’t refuse.
Can Dutch survive assassins, monsters, and psychopathic drivers long enough to complete her mission as well as take part in the race—or is this the year death finally catches up with her in a blazing tangle of wreckage?
The book comes out at the beginning of March 2020 in three formats: a signed, hardback edition, a paperback and for Amazon Kindle. I'm also investigating the possibility of an audiobook.
And the cover design by J Caleb Design is awesome.
REMINDER: if you want to be informed when the book becomes available, join my mailing list. I only occasionally send out mailshots, mostly when I have something coming out or an important announcement. Otherwise, click on one of the above links to be taken to the Amazon pre-order page. I'll update this post with details of the paperback and hardback as they become available and also add links to the sidebars and other pages of my website.
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