Wednesday, January 11, 2012

The cover for my Actual First Novel

Here's the cover for my novel, Jumalten tuho / Twilight of the Gods. It will be out next month from Pikku-idis, a small publishing outfit run by Jari Tammi, novelist in his own right. The cover illo is made from a painting by Juha Korhonen.

And the book? For the Finnish readers, there's a pretty good description at the publisher's website here, but maybe I should say something about it here as well, in English (as there has been some interest in it among British literary agents...). Twilight of the Gods takes place in 1928, in the small town of Forssa. I'm quite familiar with the town, since my father was born there and his mother lived there until she died some years ago, and I've visited the place quite often. I haven't strived for accuracy, though, and I've taken some liberties and left the descriptions a bit vague on purpose, but I say: hell with descriptions and historical accuracy anyway! Entertainment is more important!

Twilight of the Gods is, despite the pompous title, a pulpy rollercoaster ride with some hardboiled Finnish cops who've got shotguns, a strange monster that's been hiding in something called Void for almost 2,000 years, a Finnish private eye who's got his guns straight from Vatican, a gorgeous-looking black angel who's also got a gun, plus some zombies. All this relates to the Finnish Civil War that has ended ten years ago. I'll add that this book has nothing to do with Wagner. (Maybe Karl Edward.) It's a hybrid of several genres: serial killer novel (it turns out to be something else entirely, though), hardboiled crime pulp fiction, religious satire, historical conspiracy novel and straight-forward horror. It's not The Da Vinci Code, let me assure you.

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