Future Treasures: Glass Town by Steven Savile
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Steven Savile has written several Warhammer books, including Curse of the Necrarch (2008), and the Vampire Wars: The Von Carstein trilogy (2008). His novels include Moonlands (2012) and Sunfail (2015), and he’s written for Doctor Who, Torchwood, and Stargate. His US debut is Glass Town, a tale of magic and mystery lurking in London. It arrives in hardcover from St. Martin’s Press next month.
In 1924, two brothers both loved Eleanor Raines, a promising young actress from the East End of London. She disappeared during the filming of Alfred Hitchcock’s debut, Number 13, which itself is now lost. It was the crime of the age, capturing the imagination of the city: the beautiful actress never seen again, and the gangster who disappeared the same day.
Generations have passed. Everyone involved is long dead. But even now their dark, twisted secret threatens to tear the city apart.
Joshua Raines is about to enter a world of macabre beauty, of glittering celluloid and the silver screen, of illusion and deception, of impossibly old gangsters and the fiendish creatures they command, and most frighteningly of all, of genuine magic.
He is about to enter Glass Town.
The generations-old obsession with Eleanor Raines’s unsolved case is about to become his obsession, handed down father-to-son through his bloodline like some unwanted inheritance. But first he needs to bury his grandfather and absorb the implications of the confession in his hand, a letter from one of the brothers, Isaiah, claiming to have seen the missing actress. The woman in the red dress hadn’t aged a day, no matter that it was 1994 and she’d been gone seventy years.
Long buried secrets cannot stay secrets forever. Hidden places cannot stay hidden forever.
The magic that destroyed one of the most brutal families in London’s dark history is finally failing, and Joshua Raines is about to discover that everything he dared dream of, everything he has ever feared, is waiting for him in Glass Town.
Glass Town will be published by St. Martin’s Press on December 5, 2017. It is 352 pages, priced at $25.99 in hardcover and $12.99 for the digital edition.
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Steven also wrote one Sherlock Holmes book for Titan – Murder at Sorrow’s Crown.
I have it but have not yet read it.
Ah! That explains why Titan’s Sherlock Books kept coming up when I Googled him.
Thanks for this, chaps. I hope it indeed does prove to be a future treasure. And thanks to Bob for the shoutout for Sherlock. It’s always interesting what Google decides to share, eh? I’d have thought it’d be the ‘big’ book, Silver, and the most recent, Parallel Lines, but a few places pick up on the little self-published ebook experiment, Moonlands.
Anyway, just wanted to say seeing this kinda made my day. Way back when issue one came out I submitted a story, then there was the whole change of editor etc and John took over. I don’t want to even think about how old that makes us all…
You’re most welcome, Steven! And congratulations on scoring a most excellent cover. Seriously, I could stare at that thing all day.
Glad you remember the early days of Black Gate! Yeah, it was definitely mumbly-mumble years ago. For the record though, I was always the editor. Dave Truesdale was my slush reader for about 8 months, and he did an excellent job in that capacity. I was eventually forced to fire him for (among other things) consistently telling people he was the editor, and that he was buying their stories. I bought about 10% of what Dave sent me, so I was blithely pissing off about 90% of the people Dave passed to me, who thought he’d been brutally “overruled by the publisher.”
I hope you weren’t one of them. Ah, the ups and downs of small press publishing. 🙂