My first novel

Here's the cover for my first novel, Outoa huminaa, Joe Novak / It's a Weird Buzz, Joe Novak. It's a self-publication, so I'm not sure if it really counts, and the print run is only 50 - I can take more, if I run out of copies. So far I've sold five, and since I got the books from the printers earlier today, it seems I'll have to print extra copies.

The book is about my fictional hero, private eye Joe Novak, who runs into some weird things happening in the early sixties, sometime after JFK has been shot. There are weird sex cults, UFOs and men dressed in black - there's actually an abundance of them. In the middle of the plot are a brother and a sister who have moved from rural Washington to LA; the brother's wife has died from cancer and he seems to have lost his mind and has a habit of disappearing from time to time. Joe Novak runs for help - but notices pretty soon he doesn't know what's going on.

I described the book elsewhere as a mix between Carter Brown and David Lynch: it's playful and jokey and weird and incoherent at the same time. Joe Novak runs into beautiful and strange ladies in a tale that's full of secret and changing identities. I hope the mixture works, and I added some sadness in there, too, as befits the hardboiled private eye novel.

The book has only 90 pages, the text is somewhat under 20,000 words. The cover is done by Henri Joela who's also done stuff for my magazines, Isku and others. He says he took inspiration from a Finnish edition of a James Hadley Chase novel.

If anyone's interested (the Finnish readers, I mean), I'm selling the book for mere 6 euros. The publisher is called Verikoirakirjat, meaning Blood Hound Press. There's really no publisher under that name, but I've used it earlier, in the Robert Silverberg booklet I made some years back.