The Book Plank

Under Ground by S.L. Grey The Sanctum is a luxurious, self-sustaining survival condominium situated underground in rural Maine. It's a plush bolt-hole for the rich and paranoid - a place where they can wait out the apocalypse in style. When a devastating super-flu virus hits the States, several families race to reach it. All have their own motivations for entering The Sanctum. All are hiding secrets. But when the door locks and someone dies, they realize the greatest threat to their survival may not be above ground - it may already be inside . . . There is a certain theme that gets me really excited: "post apocalyptic " . This can range from a fantasy style to science fiction. What works best for me personally is when you can relate the events to our current time frame. There are doom prophets that say the end is nigh, and when you look at some events that happened over the last years well... Anyway. When I read the synopsis of Under Ground I knew it was the...

Guest Blog: How to hook your reader by SL Grey We were asked to share a few tips on how to make horror writing more believable, but it’s less realist credibility than a suspension of disbelief we aim for when we write. That way, readers can trust what they’re being shown and can get drawn into the story. That’s when we know our writing is working – when we hook the reader in emotionally and physically. These are some of the strategies we try: Do the research Since coffee-swilling writers locked in small garrets don’t make for the most exciting protagonists, at some stage we all have to go beyond the famous advice to ‘write what you know’. In The Mall we drew on our shared fear of shopping malls and consumerism, and in The Ward we mined our collective experiences at the wrong end of a scalpel, but when it came to our third novel, The New Girl , we chose to delve into topics that were way beyond our personal experience, including paedophilia and the phenomenon of reborn ...

PAN MACMILLAN BUYS NEW TRILOGY IN THE TRADITION OF GEORGE R. R. MARTIN AND DAVID GEMMELL Pan Macmillan is delighted to report the acquisition of a new epic fantasy series by John Gwynne. Senior Commissioning editor Bella Pagan bought World rights from agent John Jarrold, in a six-figure deal. This new standalone trilogy will be set in the same stirring Celtic-inspired world as John’s first quartet, the Faithful and the Fallen. Here, the Banished Lands now seem at peace. However, guardians appointed to enforce it have their own agenda, and mankind will suffer. One central character, Rae, is part-guardian and part-human. And if she can prevail through conflict, crisis and adventure, she may hold the key to humanity’s ultimate freedom. John Gwynne’s debut novel, Malice , won the David Gemmell Morningstar Award for Best Fantasy Debut. And on the new deal, Gwynne said: ‘ I'm absolutely overjoyed that Pan Macmillan will be publishing a new trilogy set in the Banished Land...

Pan Macmillan win bidding auction to acquire ‘hot property’ Blake Crouch’s DARK MATTER Editorial Director, Julie Crisp has acquired UK and Commonwealth rights from Alexis Hurley at Inkwell Management to  Dark Matter in a nice six figure deal after an exciting multi-publisher auction based on a 140 page partial.   Imagine Stephen King’s The Time Traveller’s Wife starring Jason Bourne, and you’ve got the central concept of this pulse-pounding new thriller, that has already sold in a fantastic preempt to Molly Stern at Crown for a seven figure deal and also had film rights optioned by Sony Pictures  for $1.25 million after they beat five other film studios to take the rights off the table. The novel will be published in summer 2016. Dark Matter is the story of Jason Dessen,  a forty-year-old physics professor living with his wife and son in Chicago. One night, after an evening out he’s kidnapped at gunpoint by a masked man, driven to an aban...

PAN MACMILLAN BUYS NEW TRILOGY IN THE TRADITION OF JONATHAN STRANGE AND MR NORRELL   Pan Macmillan is delighted to report the acquisition of Sorcerer to the Crown by debut novelist Zen Cho. Senior Commissioning editor Bella Pagan bought UK and Commonwealth rights in this novel and two others by Cho from Penguin US. And this book generated a great deal of excitement, with auctions on both sides of the Atlantic. Zen Cho’s creation is an irresistible combination of Georgette Heyer and Susanna Clarke, with a pinch of fairyland in a brilliantly-drawn Regency London setting. With the BBC TV series of Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell due in 2015, enthusiasm for this type of fiction will be running high. In the novel, Cho draws us in with charismatic protagonists and sparkling plotting. Here Zacharias Wythe is England's first African Sorcerer Royal. But a faction schemes to remove him from his position by fair means or foul. He must also contend with the Fairy Court refusi...