A Blast of Hunters

Published July 2019 by Snuggly Books

380 pages

Cover Text

London in the near future. A familiar city where the faces of the passers-by are painted with pain and where thoughts are dark and restless. For one of the city’s lost residents, waiting for oblivion on the railway tracks late one night, nothing should ever have mattered again. Instead, a chance encounter plunges him into the chasms of the city—to a place where prophecies of doom are muttered and where the urban hunters prowl, as the spectres of the Measuring Men walk the streets, rulers in hand. A story of outsiders and subversion.

My first novel was a very strange entity – ideas-driven, angry and transgressive.  A slipstream and speculative book set in the fairly near future, it tells the story of Train Man – from attempted suicide on the railway line to a totally unexpected journey through the subversive underworld of the city.  The normal is never all there is and whatever layer one exists on, there are always more below it – and sometimes there are layers of subversion far below the more familiar ones of street protests and activism.  A Blast of Hunters follows this journey against a backdrop of a London that is boiling over into social unrest during a very hot week of midsummer madness – a London where bungled environmental legislation has led to the consumption of meat being banned entirely and a thriving black market – and where environmental degradation has led to some areas of the city being flooded and abandoned, sealed off behind sea walls.  It is a journey that ranges from the horrific to the touching to the absurd and even to the surreal.

This is a book that has already led to polarised reactions and this is the one title of mine that I almost want to put a trigger warning on.  Warning: if you can’t cope with subversive thought and action, portrayals of depression and the suicidal mind, the deranged and twisted sides of animal activism, scenes of animal cruelty and human blood-lust, then steer clear!  

There is a lot more I could say about this, but that would probably lead to spoilers.  Click through for a more in-depth essay on the politics and driving forces behind this book.

A Blast of Hunters exists as a paperback and a limited hardcover edition of 60 copies.