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Exciting News! The four WOLF KINGDOM books start coming out in June! The first two – 1. ESCAPE! and 2. UNDER SIEGE – in June, and then the final two – 3. RACE TO THE RUINS and 4. THE HEAVY CROWN – in August.
Like earlier quartets in the ‘Fantastica’ series (by Ian Irvine, Fiona Mcintosh and Kim Wilkins), they’re for readers age 8 to 12, and each book is fairly short in itself. Yet Wolf Kingdom is a whole world, and there’s a whole history and story arc building up across the four novels. At the same time, each book contains a separate adventure that can be read entirely on its own (except perhaps Book 4).
This is a world that’s under the brutal rule of an army of wolves. Tam and Nina join up with an outlaw band in their secret hideout … and gather magical objects to help in the fight against the wolves. All that and much, MUCH more!
The icing on the cake is the artwork by Laura Peterson. I’m very very lucky that she was chosen to do the illustrations – they’re so dramatic! And the wolves are so wolfish! Here’s her image for the front cover of Book 1. ESCAPE!
And here’s her equally stunning image for the front cover of Book 2, UNDER SIEGE
There’ll be lots more about WOLF KINGDOM going up on this website very soon! Published by Omnibus/Scholastic
MEANWHILE
Sassycat: The Night of the Dead was a Notable Book in the CBC awards list, and made the shortlist in the Aurealis Awards for Best Children's Fiction of 2005.
Here's the last paragraph of a great review of Sassycat in Good Reading magazine:
Here is a riveting, humorous and entertaining read. The animals are the stars throughout—a perfect choice of main characters. The storyline is fantastic and both the dialogue and language are impressive. Make time to finish it in one sitting, for you won’t be able to put it down.
***** five stars
MEOW!
Yes, it's an animal story! A serious animal story, like Watership Down, seriously imagining experience from a cat's point of
view. Humorous too, especially with the secondary animal characters,
e.g. Lorenzo, the sleazy lizard with an eye for the ladies, Thaddeus
the cantankerous old possum, Darlene the loud vulgar screechy cockatoo, Witzer the yappy little terrier, Bernie the big old softie labrador, and the four rats who 'have a dream' of being taken in as pets ('why not, we can be just as cuddlesome and cute as any other animal?') Sassycat herself is the essence of all superior self-regarding catliness!
(She reveals the secret of why cats are so superior - it's because they have so many highly successful dreams!) I've always wanted to write an animal story, and what made it
happen was when I saw I could tell a supernatural story at the same time. (Cats and the supernatural - the perfect combination!) The supernatural side develops a whole new mythology of how the supernatural originates and functions, as understood by the animals. I had great fun inventing that! Plus many new types of ghosts and entities, e.g. flat shadows that creep across floors and walls in the shape of human hands or arms or masklike faces; e.g black blister-like blobs that move along branches or rise up in the patterns of a carpet. The supernatural entities are attempting a major invasion of our world and only the animals can prevent their army from spreading out from a nearby cemetery. (Humans, as usual, don't have a clue that they're under threat.) It's all quite dark and eerie at times!
I guess it's aimed in the first place at younger readers of,
say 10 to 15, but it's also suitable for all readers, especially all
cat-lovers!
More to come soon. For starters, here's a map of Sassycat's territory:
THE BLACK CRUSADE
Since picking up two Aurealis Awards, including the Golden Aurealis for best novel in any category, The Black Crusade just keeps powering along! It's published by Chimaera Publications, at a price of $19.95 from all good bookshops! If you have to order it in, tell your bookshop that Chimaera’s distributor is Dennis Jones & Associates, and the book’s ISBN is 0-9752143-0-6. The amazing front cover is by Kerri Valkova: 
Okay, I admit it’s a very odd novel, maybe the oddest novel ever written! It’s a prequel to my cult gothic novel, The Vicar of Morbing Vyle. Don’t be put off by the Preface, the story stands entirely on its own.
It’s lurid, gothic, farcical and macabre. I still don’t know what made me invent characters like Fliss Driddle, Raveena Fike and Lord Malicide Sain, or episodes like the milk-drinking memory-ghosts, the child-loaves baked by Horace Cull or the doting Love-Vampires of Transylvania!
And that’s not even the weirdest part of it. The weirdest part of it is the way it’s been taken up by a group who call themselves ‘vilewatchers’ who claim to be followers of Martin Smythe. How can they be followers of a character I invented out of my own head? I don’t understand how it’s all getting away from me. Most of all, I don’t understand how the vilewatchers website managed to appear even before the novel was published!
Worst of all, they've now managed to infiltrate this website with their own secret messages! They're trying to say I didn't write The Black Crusade, and all sorts of other crazy things. If you discover secret hotspots on these pages, please don't click on them! You'll be better off not knowing what they believe! And whatever you do, for the sake of your own sanity, don't go to their website!
Stay instead with the Richard Harland website and browse the map of the Black Crusade, and seven outrageous extracts. The Truth about me
is on my bio page under Author,
along with some helpful writing tips.
I've written three adult SF/thrillers in the "Eddon and Vail"
series. The Ferren
trilogy is fantasy for a crossover audience, both adult and
Young Adult, from twelve to a hundred. Walter
Wants to be a Werewolf is mainly for readers between ten and
thirteen.
The Black Crusade and The Vicar of Morbing Vyle are definitely for adults!
Right now, I'm writing a fantasy for young readers, to appear in The Lost Shimmaron series. My title is Into the Abyss, and that's exactly what it's about - a journey down down down into a great crack in the earth, many kilometres deep.
You can contact
me at richard@richardharland.net
I'd love to hear
from you.
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