Where do I begin? Perhaps with a blog post I wrote a few years ago, about how a book I loved went out on sub and got many nibbles but no offers and how it broke my heart a little bit? Yeah, we’ll start there. Reader, Coil was that book. Is the message here ‘never give up?’. I’m not so sure. There are definitely books you need to give up on, but I think you know in the end what those books are and when their time has come. And you know equally when it is not time to give up on a book. It was not Coil’s time. Fact is I would NEVER have given up on this book. So when Apex announced they’d be opening their doors for a month in January this year, I marked the date in my diary and made myself a promise: I was going to submit Coil. I had no expectations, only hope, because I knew Apex was the perfect home for Coil. But I also have quite a few of their books on my Kindle, and hoo boy do they publish terrific authors. That was not me. That IS not me. But it turns out, by some crazy miracle, it will be! My dark, dingy biopunk thriller is going to be published by Apex in mid to late 2019 and, honestly, I’m so fucking stoked! Like AAAAAHHHH!!! Apex and Coil were made for each other! So what’s Coil all about, you ask? Do you? I hope you do. Rope is watching:
Bone Adams: mortician, legend, the only person without body modifications in a city where body mods define humanity.
Called to unravel the contortionist horror of Rope’s victims, Bone finds their mods removed, the only clue to their identities a tattooed tag on each body. As he delves deeper into the mystery of these nameless bodies, he realises they are an encoded message aimed at him.
Persuaded by City Officer Stark, he enters the labyrinth of the sewers, chasing Stark’s primary suspect; semi-mythical Man-Machine Burneo. This leads Bone to an unsettling encounter, and a gut-churning discovery, a gift that confirms he is the focus of Rope’s game. Shell-shocked, Bone runs to his familiar haven, a bar, where he meets the enigmatic Lever and witnesses her perform an act so inhuman his mind cracks.
He becomes fixated on her, on change. Embarks on his own mission of discovery to the Zone, the centre of modification in his home city, The Spires. There, he learns things about himself and the world he thinks he knows that test his sanity to its limit. He chases Lever’s trail from tattoo parlour to Zone sanctuary, oblivious to the coils closing in around him as he runs toward a confrontation that will cost him everything he is.
Briefly put, or TL;DR: Coil is set in a decaying future earth, with serial killing as you’ve never seen it, a man-machine whose mind is as bizarre and painful as his body, and my favourite kind of characters: flawed ones. It’s a story about the pain of transformation, about how obsession darkens and warps the heart, and about how our history can define, or destroy, us. I cannot wait for you all to meet it.
Word Bullets 