Without further ado… Brian, take it away.

***

Last Days, my novel that just appeared, has had a varied and complicated life.

It started when Paul Miller of Earthling Press approached me about doing a limited edition chapbook.  At the time I was reading a lot of noir and hard-boiled fiction.  The writer who really stuck with me was Dashiell Hammett—not his two best known books, The Maltese Falcon and The Thin Man which I’m not wildly impressed by—but his first novel Red Harvest.  The thing I loved about that book was how it felt like Hammett was working without a net, creating the genre out of thin air.  I’d also been reading or rereading a lot of things that combined elements of different genres, books that blended the detective genre to horror or to SF, books that refused to stay neatly within genre lines.  As a result, “The Brotherhood of Mutilation,” drawing on noir, horror, and literature, seemed almost to write itself.

Almost immediately I wanted to continue the story, but didn’t want it to be something that paled next to the original.  I mulled over the idea for several years, let it develop as organically and naturally as I could.  I read more noir and crime fiction.  Jim Thompson’s Savage Night really amazed me and made me realize how strange noir could get.  Vengeance books by Fredrick Brown, Dan Marlowe, and Richard Stark pointed me where to go next.  Then I saw Odd Nerdrum’s painting “One Story Singer.”  And then two friends mentioned that Ludwig Wittgenstein’s brother Paul was a one-handed piano player.  Once I realized that it seemed like more than half the people I’d met in the last year were named Paul, everything else fell into place and I wrote the second part that made “The Brotherhood of Mutilation” into Last Days.

So now a short novella has a second, fuller life as a novel.  As “Brotherhood” it was published in a very small edition, just a few hundred copies, but it got into the right hands:  a French publisher bought translation rights, a filmmaker living in Denmark wrote a screenplay, and I’ve had a more letters about it than almost anything else I’ve done. Last Days appeared in France in September, where it received more reviews and attention than any of my other books; I’m keeping my fingers crossed that it’ll get a similar reception here.

Read a free PDF here.