Vendor
	Mohrbooks Literary Agency Sebastian Ritscher
Original language
English
Categories
Historical adventure fiction
Weblink
http://www.amazon.com/Something- …

SOMETHING RED

Douglas Nicholas

From debut novelist Douglas Nicholas comes a haunting fantasy of love, murder, and sorcery set in one of the coldest winters of thirteenth-century England.

During the 1200s in northwest England, in one of the coldest winters in living memory, a formidable middle-aged Irishwoman and the troupe she leads are trying to drive their three wagons across the mountains before the heavy snows set in. Molly, her powerful and enigmatic lover, her fey granddaughter, and her young apprentice, soon discover that something terrible prowls the woods. As the group travels from refuge to refuge, it becomes apparent that the mysterious evil force must be faced and defeated—or else they will surely die.

An intoxicating and spirited blend of fantasy, mythology, and history, Something Red features the most fascinating of characters including shapeshifters, Irish battle queens, Norman knights, Templars, pilgrims, Saracens, a Lithuanian noblewoman, warrior monks, strong—even dangerous—women, and ten murderous mastiffs, as well as an epic snowstorm that an early reader described as “one of the coldest scenes since Snow Falling on Cedars.”

Douglas Nicholas is an award-winning poet whose work has appeared in numerous poetry journals, and the author of four previous books including Iron Rose, a collection of poems inspired by New York City. He lives in New York’s Hudson Valley.

Available products
Book Published 2012-09-01 by Emily Bestler Books / Atria
Book Published 2012-09-01 by Emily Bestler Books / Atria

Comments

Something Red absolutely blew me away. This is one of the best debuts I've read in years and the story itself still haunts my dreams. It was all the best elements of Irish folklore, historical fiction, and a very frightening mystery at its cores.

Debut novelist Douglas Nicholas goes for the throat with Something Red. Rich in history, ankle deep in blood, and packed with brilliant writing and whip-smart plotting. Bravo!

I loved Something Red. Douglas Nicholas conjures up the distant thirteenth century with prose as magical as that practiced by his sorceress-queen. This is a stunning debut novel of lyrical power and suspenseful drama. The hair-raising finale will keep you reading far into the night.

Ably conjuring the beauties and drawbacks of the past, and with an engaging and unusual cast-list, Something Red is a thoroughbred novel of nightmare terror, ruled by a force of sheer evil that seems, and may well prove, unstoppable.

Not for the faint of heart, this pulse pounding page-turner grabs you from the start and never lets you go. A wickedly clever and evocative combination of history, horror, mystery, and magic.

Douglas Nicholas’ Something Red is a novel which will leave you breathless with admiration, fascination and shock. . . . At first it seems to be an exceptionally well written historical novel, but when the story begins to unfold and things begin to develop the reader will notice that there's much more to this novel than what meets the eye. This novel starts as historical fiction, but soon turns into historical fantasy (the mystical and mythological fantasy elements are slowly revealed to the reader).

A hauntingly affecting historical novel with a touch of magic.

In his first novel, Something Red, award winning poet Douglas Nicholas channels a fiercer beast than his usual poetic muse, producing a remarkable variation on the perennial werewolf tale. . . . Characterization, setting, atmosphere—all are deftly and expertly handled. And then there’s the language. Oh the language. Nicholas writes with an authentic historical prose that both anchors the story in its setting and conveys the fascinating movement of a language in flux. There are moments, simple in terms of plot, but written with such startling beauty that they imbue the larger story with a kind of perverse joy, making Hob’s coming-of-age not simply a matter of fear and necessity, but of strength and love. Something Red is an excellent debut, from a truly gifted author.

This is a beautifully written work, with evocative prose which captures the essence of traveling in winter in Middle Ages England.

Written with great skill, this atmospheric, yet gritty, story will remain with you, and it is a wonderful addition to the long line of stories devoted to the magic of fairy tales.

Rich in historical detail, this suspenseful coming-of-age fantasy grabs the reader with the facts of life in medieval England and the magic spells woven into its landscape. Debut novelist Nicholas brings a poetic turn to his prose (Molly hits a bull’s-eye with a dagger the way “a gardener carelessly flicks a pebble away from a plot he is weeding”) and introduces monks, Crusaders, tanners, foreign nobility, shape-shifters, and even oxen to bring his magical Middle Ages to splendid life.

Douglas Nicholas can artfully narrate a story. I was engaged from beginning to end . . . Something Red is sure to be a best seller.

Douglas Nicholas’s Something Red is a tour de force. Primeval forces of nature and good and evil tear at each other in the frigid winter wilderness of 12th century England. An Irish woman and her small intrepid band confront monstrous evil conjured by a Lithuanian magus. Nicholas's vivid evocations of winter will chill you to the bone but you will not be able to stop reading.

Relax. Master storyteller Douglas Nicholas is about to transport you to far-away places, show you far-off times; but hold on tight: while the cresting rhythm of his cadenced prose mounts, your throbbing pulse—that same blood clock his characters tell time by—will pound unstoppably, as identical horror howls fatally outside, smiles beguilingly within, and your skin senses stone sweat behind the castle's painted plaster walls, beneath midwinter-deep drifts of snow. When I say Something Red is a sensation, I mean precisely that: this book's sensational!