EDGY AND TRANSGRESSIVE FICTION AND NON-FICTION
Literary Stalker
IF YOU VALUE YOUR LIFE, DON’T DARE
TO SUGGEST TO NICK CHATTERTON
THAT HE’S NOT A GOOD WRITER!
Nick is embarking on his latest crime/horror novel – a pastiche of the Vincent Price movie Theatre of Blood, where Nick draws up a hit list of his enemies in the writing world and gets his narrator to dispatch them according to the plots of classic crime and horror movies.
Top of the list is a writer who is both a superstar of the horror genre and who in Nick’s reckoning has wronged him the most. Nick first met Hugh Canford-Eversleigh at a reading more than a decade ago and fell madly in love with him, interpreting their encounter as the start of a magnificent affair. Nick’s feelings soon expanded into full-blown obsession, and he stalked Hugh, believing his love would eventually be returned. Nick was repeatedly rebuffed, much to his anger, but it was years later that his rage reached murderous proportions, due to an unexpected and outlandish twist of fate.
Now through his novel, The Facebook Murders, Nick is settling all his old scores, blurring the lines between autobiography and fiction – and with his obsessions reaching fever pitch, blurring the lines between writing about nasty stuff and doing nasty stuff for real.
Set within the milieu of British horror, fantasy and sci-fi writing, Roger Keen’s psychological metacrime thriller continues with the literary experiments of his previous book – the novelistic memoir The Mad Artist – involving self-begetting and nested narratives looping and interfacing with one another. As a horror/crime piece with liberal amounts of violence and multifarious nods to simpatico novels and movies, it plays with ideas of genre, and in the tradition of metafiction, it’s very ‘nudge-wink’, tongue-in-cheek and blackly comic.
“Literary Stalker works wonderfully as a genre thriller with a delightfully absurd comic edge…a clever piece of genre writing, self-aware and self-critical, but uncompromisingly entertaining. If there are any criticisms to be made about the novel, it would take a braver reviewer than me willing to risk pointing them out to the author.” – Noel Megahey, The Digital Fix, Geek Life
‘Suspenseful, impeccably researched, grisly, with judicious helpings of macabre humour, I relished this 'Russian doll' story-within-a-story." — Simon Clark, author of The Night of the Triffids and Vampyrrhic
"This is quite a wickedly written book where at times I just didn’t know if it was a story in a story or actually happening, What I did know was there were some pretty gruesome murders all carried out with total satisfaction for Nick. I really took to this story having seen the original movies when they hit the cinema so it was even easier to imagine the scenes that Nick created in my mind. Believe me they were disturbing the first time round and it didn’t change here. The author uses his obvious love and knowledge of the film industry for this book and it works extremely well." – Susan Hampson, Books From Dawn Till Dusk
"Keen could have taken the easy route and written this as a straightforward novel with a linear narrative, but Keen isn't your average writer, and his use of a story within a story multidimensional narrative is more than just a gimmick, it takes reading experience into a whole new level of cleverness." — Jim Mcleod, Ginger Nuts of Horror
Read an interview with Roger about his film career and how it influenced the novel: The Dorset Book Detective. "I find the best kind of inspiration comes from unexpected things which happen to me in life, weird and uncanny coincidences, and the kind of quirky incidents that sometimes occur that make you say: ‘You just couldn’t make that up."
More information here: Literary Stalker