Tag: Comics

I am thrilled to be hosting a spot on the THE RUSH by Si Spurrier & Nathan C. Gooden Blog Tour hosted by Rockstar Book Tours. Check out my post and make sure to enter the giveaway!

 

About The Book:

Title: THE RUSH: This Hungry Earth Reddens Under Snowclad Hills (The Rush #1-5)

Author: Si Spurrier, Addison Duke (Colorist), Nathan C. Gooden (Illustrations), Hassan Otsmane-Elhaou (Letterer), Adrian F. Wassel (Editor)

Pub. Date: August 9, 2022

Publisher: Vault Comics

Formats: Paperback, eBook

Pages: 136

Find it: Goodreads, Amazon, Kindle, B&N, iBooks, Kobo, TBD, Bookshop.org

 

Historical horror that chills to the bone, The RUSH. is for fans of Dan Simmons’, The Terror mined with a Northwestern Yukon gold rush edge. Answer the call of the wild north and stampede to the Klondike…

ALL THAT GLITTERS IS NOT GOLD. ALL THAT HUNGERS IS NOT HOLY. ALL THAT LIVE
ARE NOT ALIVE.

This Hungry Earth Reddens Under Snowclad Hills.

1899, Yukon Territory. A frozen frontier, bloodied and bruised by the last great Gold Rush. But in the lawless wastes to the North, something whispers in the hindbrains of men, drawing them to a blighted valley, where giant spidertracks mark the snow and impossible guns roar in the night.

To Brokehoof, where gold and blood are mined alike. Now, stumbling towards its haunted forests comes a woman gripped not by greed — but the snarling rage of a mother in search of her child…

From Si Spurrier (Way of X, Hellblazer) and Nathan C. Gooden (Barbaric, Dark One) comes THE RUSH, a dark, lyrical delve into the horror and madness of the wild Yukon.

Collects the entire series. For fans of The Terror, Fortitude, Coda, and Moonshine.

---

Reviews:

“The book strikes a wealthy mixed vein of sophisticated psychological chills and monstrous horror.”― Publishers Weekly

“Gritty historical drama meets supernatural horror in this sumptuously drawn tale set during the Yukon Gold Rush.” ― PUBLISHERS WEEKLY

“The Rush is a chilling bit of historical horror. Rugged and raw and thoroughly researched. It’s got such a wonderfully creepy sense of menace but most of all it’s the moving story of a mother searching for her child, that’s its beating heart. Wonderful work.”  — Victor Lavalle (best-selling and award-winning author of he anthology, Slapboxing with Jesus and four novels, The Ecstatic, Big Machine, The Devil in Silver, and The Changeling, the fantasy-horror novella The Ballad of Black Tom, and the comics series Destroyer and Eve)

“The Rush is a splendidly savage tale of frontier scum and the doom they’ve brought down upon themselves, and the innocents cursed to suffer alongside them. I for one can’t wait to see more.”  — Garth Ennis (best-selling and award-winning writer, Preacher, and writer/co-creator of The Boys)

---

Guest Post:

Talk about your favorite kind of character to write about

SS: A bastard will always be more compelling than a boy scout. That’s at least as true for writers as it is for readers.

Listen. If it’s accurate to say that we’re all culturally keyed to hope for positive endings in fiction, and that we enjoy the tension of the journey, then the simplest expression of a satisfying narrative is, simply, whether or not a good person is able to acheive a good thing. On the surface that accounts for a surprisingly huge percentage of all stories. It’s the root of all heroic mythology, right? It’s almost every family-friendly tale you’ve ever encountered. Right? A true believer would call it An Aspirational And Therefore Morally Valuable Trope. The world would be a better place if we all acted a bit more like heroes.

Right?

But it’s a bit fucking boring. Isn’t it? And – I’ll go you one better – it’s not even a very useful lesson.

And, okay, maybe this a product of cynical modernism, maybe it’s my privelege speaking, maybe it’s performatively bourgeoisie, maybe it’s just because I’m a ghastly British malcontent seeped in the decaying disappointments and toxicities of a once mighty (and comphrehensivel abhorrent) Empire, suffering the grouchy-hearted hangover that follows in the wake of lost importance–
–but I’d far rather the stakes of a story relate to whether or not an awful person can be better.

And, y’know what? Look again at those allegedly infantile narratives that defined our formative relationship with story and I don’t think it’s a stretch to say it’s been there from the start. It’s there in The Epic of Gilgamesh, with our hero struggling to reconcile his effortless mightiness with the ultimate impotence of mortality. It’s in the squabbles and venalities of the Olympian Gods. It’s there in the violent spasms of Heracles, getting too caught-up in adrenaline and inadvertently pulverising lovers and friends. It’s there in Odin’s all-consuming lust for knowledge and Thor’s bone-headedness. It’s there in every overreaching trick played by Coyote, Maui, Anansi.

Our ancestors understood better than us that a perfect archetype is far less valuable than a flawed one. For all their elevated power and incredible feats, the oldest gods, demigods and heroes were profoundly – even depressingly – human. Yet these are the parts of the myths which nowadays litter the edit-room floor when we recount these tales to our children.

Privately I suspect there’s a little broken switch in our lizard brains. A moral blindspot, refusing to acknowledge our consonance with imperfection. It means more to us, I think, that Darth Vader ultimately returns to the light than that his morally unimpeachable son declines the dark, and yet countless generations of storytellers and story-consumers continue to insist on the Good Person Does Good paradigm. Fans seethe and shriek about boycotts when Superman makes a lapse of judgement or Captain America reveals inner darkness, as if these lofty moral archetypes are somehow irreducible, sacred, hermetically sealed in their hard-won saintliness. As if perfection is a useful aspiration.

It isn’t. If you fuck up, you can make amends. If you are broken you can attempt to repair yourself. And if you are irreparable, you can – at least – own it. These are the axioms that matter to me.

So, yes. Give me a bastard. Let me decide whether to give them knowledge of their own inadequacies or leave them stew in ignorance – both are extraordinarily fertile grounds for stories. Give me a liar. Let me decide whether they’re lying to the world aroud them or to the reader or to themselves. Or all of the above. Give me a coward. Give me a depressive. Give me a lecher or a berserker or an idiot. The journey to self-restraint, or self-improvement, or even the merest glimmer of self-knowledge, is a thousand times more powerful (I think) than the journey to… ohhh, treasure, or slaying a dragon, or kissing a princess, or punching a villain, or whatever the hell our White Hatted Goodie is currently girding his loins at.

The Rush is no different, although our main character’s flaws take a little while to be fully perceived. Nettie Bridger presents as an unstoppable force of motherly duty – because that’s exactly what she is. An obsessive mother. Her love for her missing son takes on the gleam of purity in the context of the darker, uglier flavors of obsession which surround her. Avarice, lust, ambition.

And yet she is just as riddled with self-deceit as anyone around her. She willingly sets aside the evidence of her sons’s demise and chooses a path of forlorn hope, madness and mania just to keep herself going. (An uncharitable critique would position her entire story as an attempt to self-validate and self-motivate.) Her past is a patchwork of social climbing and reinvention. She’s a chameleon. She’s a cheat. She has lustful desires and isn’t afraid to use them to get what she wants. She is, in a word, complex.

Which is to say: human.

---

About Si Spurrier:

His work in the latter field stretches from award winning creator-owned books such as Numbercruncher, Six-Gun Gorilla and The Spire to projects in the U.S. mainstream like Hellblazer, The Dreaming, and X-Men. It all began with a series of twist-in-the-tail stories for the UK’s beloved 2000AD, which ignited an enduring love for genre fiction. His latest book, Coda, is being published by Boom! Studios at present.

His prose works range from the beatnik neurosis-noir of Contract to the occult whodunnit A Serpent Uncoiled via various franchise and genre-transgressing titles. In 2016 he took a foray into experimental fiction with the e-novella Unusual Concentrations: a tale of coffee, crime and overhead conversations.

He lives in Margate, regards sushi as part of the plotting process, and
has the fluffiest of cats.

Website | Twitter | Instagram | Goodreads

---

About Nathan C. Gooden:

An award-winning illustrator and sequential artist, Nathan C. Gooden is Art Director at Vault Comics. Nathan studied animation at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, and worked in film production, before co founding Vault Comics. Nathan’s previous works include Brandon Sanderson’s Dark One (Vault), Barbaric (Vault), Zojaqan (Vault), and  Killbox (from American Gothic Press). He lives in Southern California, where he plays a lot of basketball and hikes constantly with his wife. 

Website |  Instagram | Goodreads

---

Giveaway Details:

2 winners will receive a finished copy of THE RUSH, US Only.

a Rafflecopter giveaway

Ends August 23^rd, midnight EST.