Sorry for shouting (again). As promised/threatened last month, I’ve just uploaded the second of six new works of fiction to Amazon Kindle. This one is Devil Hang Over Me, a tight, menacing and (he said with all humility) extremely well-written thriller with not one, not two, but THREE fantastic twists. (Actually, it might even be four – I lost track.)
Anyway you can read all about Devil here or buy a copy here.
Meanwhile here – as in here on this page, like – I’ll give a small bit of background on where it all came from. I had the opening scene in my mind for years. Two women wake from drugged sleep, trapped in a white room. Neither knows the other, or why and how they came to be there. No way in or out. What the hell is going on?
Initially, it had been a man and (slightly younger) woman. For various reasons, as you shall gradually realise if/when you read Devil, the sex of one character got changed. The motivation – the ultimate end-game being played here – has remained the same over years of writing and rewriting, but some of the details were radically altered.
I’m proud of Devil, I think it’s a damn good psychological/suspense thriller, with some nice literary flourishes. I’m most proud of the fact that, when you reach the end and understand who everyone is and what’s been going on, you can then reread over it and each line of dialogue, everything said and done by the two women inside that room, takes on a new colour, a new shape – new meaning.
Anyway, mindly interesting sidenote: originally (from late 2017) I sent this book out under a pseudonym. For a number of reasons, I didn’t want it published under my own name, so MD Burgess was born (my wife’s and my first-name initials, plus the surname of Anthony Burgess, one of the greatest geniuses in literary history IMHO).
Unfortunately, neither a publisher nor agent took the book on, although there were a few close calls. One very kind lady in England offered to publish digitally, but a family situation got in the way for a while and by the time I was ready to rock, she’d moved on from that role.
On the flipside, one Scottish publisher basically accused me of trying to “game” their submission process by sending in under an assumed name! Which was simultaneously insulting and amusing. I probably should have told her to “f**k off, how dare you accuse me of cheating”; sadly, being a powerless author, you have to suck it up sometimes and play nice with the so-called gatekeepers.
That said, I’m now doing it myself, so here’s a belated response to Scottish publishing woman: f**k off, how dare you accuse me of cheating! Ha. That felt good 🙂
Keep an eye out, here and at my Amazon author page, for updates on further Kindle releases. We’ve still got these beauties (!) to look forward to: !!SuperHyperMEGASTAR!!, a comedy/satire which crosses The X-Factor with Cyrano de Bergerac; Pretend We’re Dead, a novel about slackers in 1990s Cork; The Driving Force, a short-story collection on a theme of movement; and There is a light and it never goes out, a sort of Cloud Atlas-type thing where five stories are wrapped inside one over-arching narrative.
That’s it. As before, I hope you buy a copy or ten of Devil Hang Over Me, and hope you enjoy it…
Darragh McManus, author and journalist 