Win a Copy of Gabriel Squailia’s Dead Boys
Author Gabriel Squailia’s debut novel, Dead Boys, is heading our way in just one more week, and we want to get a copy into your horror-loving hands ASAP so read on for the details of a new contest we’re kicking off today.
Arriving on March 3rd is Dead Boys from Rochester, NY, native Gabriel Squailia. An unconventional education in India, the Middle East, and Europe under the aegis of Long Island University’s Friends World Program heightened his interest in storytelling as a cultural and political tool. While honing his chops as a writer, he’s held down dance floors for over a decade as DJ BFG. His favorite fiction-writing tool is a small, windowless room. Squailia currently lives in Berkshire County, Massachusetts, with his wife and daughter.
Here’s a bit more about him and Dead Boys, which has been likened to “Tim Burton meets The Wizard of Oz in a post-modern industrial wasteland from WALL-E”:
When asked how the idea for this book originated, the writer responded, “I was crashing on a friend’s couch in Dublin, Ireland, back in 2000; and we’d just gone out to one of Dublin’s larger pubs when someone put on the Ween album The Pod. It was the first time I’d heard their faux-Irish singalong “The Blarney Stone,” which sounded to me like a drinking song written in Hades. With the startling clarity of the truly impaired, I saw a network of underground pubs extending for miles, packed full of drunken corpses who thought nothing of pulling off their own limbs to pummel their neighbors in epic bar brawls. This vision was my first entree into the Land of the Dead, which I further developed over the next decade, spurred by dreams and research.”
As for exactly what type of “research” Squailia engaged in, he elaborated, “During a stint as a late-night librarian at Simon’s Rock College of Bard, I took advantage of my god-like Inter-Library Loan powers to read everything I could find on the physical processes of death and decomposition, the funerary and mourning rituals of various cultures, and underworld myths and folktales. Much of this material was woven into the worldbuilding, though I took liberties and stylized most everything.”
If we’ve piqued your interest and you’d like to receive a copy of Dead Boys, all you have to do is send an email to contests@dreadcentral.com including your FULL NAME AND MAILING ADDRESS. We’ll take care of the rest. Good luck!
Synopsis:
A decade dead, Jacob Campbell is a preservationist, providing a kind of taxidermy to keep his clients looking lifelike for as long as the forces of entropy will allow. But in the Land of the Dead, where the currency is time itself and there is little for corpses to do but drink, thieve, and gamble eternity away, Jacob abandons his home and his fortune for an opportunity to meet the man who cheated the rules of life and death entirely.
According to legend, the Living Man is the only adventurer to ever cross into the underworld without dying first. It’s rumored he met his end somewhere in the labyrinth of pubs beneath Dead City’s streets, disappearing without a trace. Now Jacob’s vow to find the Living Man and follow him back to the land of the living sends him on a perilous journey through an underworld where the only certainty is decay.
Accompanying him are the boy Remington, an innocent with mysterious powers over the bones of the dead, and the hanged man Leopold l’Eclair, a flamboyant rogue whose criminal ambitions spark the undesired attention of the shadowy ruler known as the Magnate.
An ambitious debut that mingles the fantastic with the philosophical, Dead Boys twists the well-worn epic quest into a compelling, one-of-a-kind work of weird fiction that transcends genre, recalling the novels of China Miéville and Neil Gaiman.
