Launch Day: The Lazarus Gate!

I sensed something new and strange. The air in the room seemed to change—even now I find it difficult to describe, but it seemed to cloy, moving like a vista shimmering in intense heat. The shadows around the corners of the room began to grow thicker, and the entire room appeared to ‘bend’, as if viewed through aged glass. The hairs on the back of my hands and wrists were on end, and the velvet drapes began to rise gently, as though being pulled by some unseen force. My eyes were drawn towards the far end of the room, to where the curtains were being attracted; there I saw, as if for the first time, a closed door, which I assumed must lead to a closet of some sort. Incredible as it sounds, I cannot be certain that the door was even there before. Around the edge of the door shone a faint, golden light that spilled from every crack. Worse, as the trilling noise ebbed and flowed in horrid, ululating waves, the door appeared to distort and heave, as though it were breathing.

- The Lazarus Gate

The Lazarus Gate is out today in the US and Canada, with its UK release to follow later (October 2^nd), and it represents the single most exciting product I’ve ever worked on. Largely because, unlike all my other ventures in the public domain, this represents not a product per se, but a labour of love, a very long time in the making.

The rather stonking cover,
designed by Titan's Julia Lloyd.

I can hardly remember when I started working on The Lazarus Gate. From concept to proper draft, it probably took me two years of evenings and weekends while I worked full time. It passed before the eyes of several trusted alpha readers, and went through four rounds of edits before finally I felt able to dangle it in front of literary agents like a fishing lure, hoping it was a gem-like fly rather than a mouldy old maggot. Since securing an agent (the rather dapper Jamie Cowen at the Ampersand Agency), and selling it to the wonderful peeps at Titan, the book has gone through further major revisions, which themselves have taken almost a year to complete, until finally here we are at the launch. You’d think after over three years of working on The Lazarus Gate at some stage or another, my enthusiasm may have waned, but honestly I’m like a big kid at Christmas time right now. My baby is out in the world at last!

So, what’s The Lazarus Gate all about? Well, at its simplest, it’s a parallel universe science fiction story set in the Victorian era (1890 to be exact). A cursory look over this blog will tell you why I chose that particular setting; it’s been a lifelong obsession of mine. The history, the literature, the language… I like to think that if I got sucked through a time portal right now and ended up in the 1890s, I’d fit right in (probably as a chimney sweep or mudlark, but beggars can’t be choosers).

Like pretty much all of my stories, The Lazarus Gate includes elements of horror and the Gothic alongside the weird science, and that’s something that will continue as a common thread through the series. The story follows John Hardwick, a soldier who has spent most of his adult life fighting in India and Burma, returning to London after being held captive by Burmese rebels. He’s a recovering opium addict, and a fish out of water in swirling London society, but is soon drawn into a confounding mystery involving dynamiters, psychics, high-falutin’ gentlemen’s clubs, and underworld gangsters. There’s detective work in the smog-shrouded streets of Victorian London, desperate battles of wills in a sinister opium den, a roguish gentleman thief, dashing officers and smoldering gypsy princesses, fights on the deck of an ironclad, and nefarious plots aplenty.

If you pick up The Lazarus Gate, then you have my eternal gratitude. If you like it, and I really hope you do, then you’ll be pleased to know that the second book in the series is nearing completion, slated for an Autumn 2016 release. For future developments, please do keep a weather eye on the blog; you can also follow me on Twitter, and Like my Facebook page, if you’re so inclined!

The Lazarus Gate is out now, and is available in all good bookshops and online stores.

UPDATE (2/10/2015): The UK Launch day is here! And the first review has been sighted here! 

More Wargaming Forays

This week, several announcements went live with my name attached, which was all very gratifying! It’s probably worth giving those things a bit of a mention, for those interested in my games design projects as opposed to literary endeavours.

First up is Mantic Games’ Warpath: Firefight (official announcement here). This is an interesting one, because rather than design a new game from scratch, I have the tricky job of taking a ruleset that’s been developed for quite some time, with substantial input from a hard core of fans, and develop a variation on the system. Essentially, I’m taking the large-scale, free-flowing strategic game and transforming it into a smaller-scale, squad-based tactical game. The brief, however, is to keep as many concepts as possible so that it’s familiar to existing players, while introducing lots of nuances and tactical elements to scratch that smaller-scale itch. No pressure then. This game will be developed during the forthcoming Kickstarter, with feedback from fans coming in even as I write, which is a very different way of working for me!

Next up, we have two games published by Osprey, due to hit the shelves in 2016 (announcement here). The first, and the one in the best shape currently, is Broken Legions, a game of fantastical skirmishes in the Roman Empire. The idea behind the game is that the Roman Empire teeters on a gladius-edge, and has sent out hard-bitten bands of legionnaires under the watchful eye of the Frumentarii (Roman secret service) to retrieve occult artefacts of great power. This, they believe, will stop ancient, foreign gods from threatening the supremacy of Rome, and secure Roman rule for a thousand years. Of course, the servants of those ancient gods aren’t best pleased, and so everyone from Egyptian cultists to druidic warbands are out to stop the Romans. There are even secret cults within Rome who believe that dabbling in the affairs of gods is unwise, and so they too oppose the legion.

This is a fantasy skirmish game, which has at its heart a granular D10 system, with a campaign play mode reminiscent of my old Legends of the Old West game. The faction-building rules are pretty freeing, drawing upon a wide range of ancients and fantasy ranges, and it occupies an ‘alternate history’ space, allowing you to field werewolves in your band of Germanic barbarians, and khopesh-wielding mummies with your Settites. Oh, and in some scenarios, you might encounter wandering monsters controlled by a simple ‘AI’ – anything from Minotaurs to flocks of Harpies.

The other game, which is farther off, is Chosen Men. No more details on this yet, save that it’s a Napoleonic skirmish game, where you control a small company of skirmishers, either operating under their own initiative, or fighting on the advance lines of a wider army, with various rules in place to represent the big battalions that are advancing ‘off-table’.

Phew! I actually have a couple more wargame announcements to hit later this year, but for now I think I’ve got rather enough on my plate…