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The Scariest Part: Adrian Cole Talks About THE SHADOW ACADEMY

shadowacademycover

Welcome to this week’s installment of The Scariest Part, a recurring feature in which authors, comic book writers, filmmakers, and game creators tell us what scares them in their latest works of horror, dark fantasy, dark science fiction, and suspense. (If you’d like to be featured on The Scariest Part, please review the guidelines here.)

My guest is Adrian Cole, whose latest novel is The Shadow Academy. Here’s the publisher’s description:

After the Plague Wars they waited for the invasion. And as the new Dark Age dawns… there is one who can bring light.

In a world little more than a whisper away from ours, the islands of Grand Brittannia lie just off the shores of the deeply forested content of Evropa, the dark and forbidding realm of legends scarcely remembered.

Grand Brittannia, itself almost completely a place of deep forest and mystery, has at its heart the crumbling, anachronistic administrative city of Londonborough. From here the Central Authority wields power over the Islands and exercises its control rigidly and clinically. Since the rigours of the Plague Wars, some hundred years in the past, when almost the entire population of the world was wiped out and the gradual decline of civilization began, industry and technology have atrophied, their development now strictly vetted by the Authority.

Out on the far-flung coasts, a network of ancient fortress ports wait in readiness for an invasion that some say will never come, their ancient, declining Academies committed to the rigours of training the defenders of the Islands. These Academies are subjected to regular inspections by Enforcers from Londonborough, and their native inhabitants are constantly being swelled by the young military graduates from the Authority’s own Military Academies in the center. Into a cauldron of intrigue and subterfuge that is the town and Academy of Petra comes Chad Mundy, the Authority’s replacement for Drew Vasillius, a veteran teacher who has committed suicide. At least, that is what he’s been told…

And now, let’s hear what the scariest part was for Adrian Cole:

The Shadow Academy introduces us to a world very much like our own, but one where the landscape and culture of the population have been changed by a distant series of catastrophes known as the Plague Wars. Grand Britannia, equivalent to our British Isles, is almost totally overgrown with forest and only a handful of cities exist, from the central Londonborough, which exercises firm and sometimes ruthless control, to the outlying satellites, such as Petra Dumnoniorum in the remote South West.

Chad Mundy is a young teacher, sent to his first posting to Petra and its bleak Academy, to educate its students in English and to train them in hand-to-hand combat. He enters an environment that is even more insular than he had anticipated, where he begins to uncover more than a few hints of rebellion against the Authority that rules both centrally and locally, and against the weakened Christian religion.

The unease that Mundy gradually feels through the first part of the book begins to take on a deeper, more tangible form when one night he accompanies some of the staff of the Academy across the river to meet some of the more openly insurgent factions and is told, secretly, that his predecessor, formally believed to have committed suicide, was murdered.

Mundy feels the hostility of this strange landscape, with its crumbling buildings and derelict ships, the treacherous currents of the river and the suggestion of the supernatural. City born and bred, he feels more than ever out of his depth in a region that has a subtle beauty about it, but where an undercurrent of deep-seated power is stirring. Even at this stage in the novel, the storm that is building meteorologically can be sensed, gathering far away, but inevitably coming.

After a gradual build-up, the book abruptly plunges Mundy into a sequence of action where he is being pursued by a gang of men, clearly intent on harming him. His flight back to Petra across the river, with its intimation of “blood on the water” and his stumbling across strange carvings on the doors of some of the houses, add to his rising fears. He is cornered, weaponless against cold-blooded opponents.

At this stage of the novel, it is not clear to the reader whether the potential supernatural elements of the novel are to be realised. The superstition of the local people, specifically encapsulated in the terror of the caretaker, Skellbow, links to a secret past in and around Petra, whose dark secrets pulse with the increasing threat of menace.

To me the “Scariest Part” is this scene of terrified flight, which captures not only form the platform for a journey for Mundy into an even darker region, but starts the unravelling of the nature of the true powers that are work in his disturbing world.

Adrian Cole: Website / Goodreads

The Shadow Academy: Amazon / Goodreads / EDGE

Adrian Cole was born in Plymouth, Devonshire in 1949. He is currently the Director of College Resources in a large secondary school in Bideford, where he now lives with his wife Judy, son Sam, and daughter Katia. He remains best known for his Dream Lords trilogy as well as his young adult novels, Moorstones and The Sleep of Giants.

The Rocketeer Is Here!

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Out now from IDW Publishing, the folks who brought you Zombies vs. Robots: This Means War!, comes their newest anthology featuring yours truly, The Rocketeer: Jet-Pack Adventures! It includes ten-brand new stories featuring the Rocketeer and a rogues’ gallery of villains, edited by Jeff Conner & Tom Waltz and illustrated by Jay Bone. Here’s the table of contents:

“The Red, White & Grey” by Yvonne Navarro
“Nazis in Paradise” by Don Webb
“Farewell, My Rocketeer” by Gregory Frost
“Atoll of Terror” by Simon Kurt Unsworth
“Sky Pirates of Rangoon” by Cody Goodfellow
“Rockets to Hell” by Nancy Holder
“Codename: Ecstasy” by Nancy A. Collins
“Flying Death” by Robert Hood
“The Mask of the Pharaoh” by Nicholas Kaufmann
“The Rivet Gang” by Lisa Morton

I’m excited about this anthology for a lot of reasons, not the least of which is that the Rocketeer is a very cool, very fun superhero. I had a great time writing this story, and I’m so glad the anthology has finally been released. In fact, just as I was preparing this blog entry, my contributor’s copies arrived in the mail!

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Pick up your copy today from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Powell’s, IndieBound, or your favorite bookseller!

The GENERAL SLOCUM’S GOLD E-book Is Now Only 99¢!

GSG-ebookcover nook

To quote Professor Farnsworth: Good news, everyone! The General Slocum’s Gold e-book is now available for only 99¢! That means you can get my critically acclaimed, Bram Stoker Award-nominated novelette — plus a bonus story — for less than a dollar! If this were a Crazy Eddie commercial, I’d tell you my prices are insane!

This price cut is available across all e-book platforms:

Kindle — 99¢!

Nook — 99¢!

Kobo — 99¢!

iBooks – 99¢!

If you’ve been holding off on buying a copy of General Slocum’s Gold, now’s your chance to nab the novelette Horror World called “a dark thrill ride that will keep you reading frantically until you reach its exciting climax” for cheap!

(Also, if you hate e-books and want a copy of the original chapbook from Burning Effigy Press, they’ve still got a few left.)

Doctor Who: “Robot of Sherwood”

After last week’s somewhat heavy “Into the Dalek,” we’re treated to a much lighter, comedic episode, “Robot of Sherwood.” The Doctor gives Clara the opportunity to visit anyone in history she wants, and she chooses Robin Hood. What follows is a virtually plotless adventure romp in Sherwood Forest that had me frequently laughing out loud.

Capaldi continues to excel in the role. I mentioned last week that I thought he couldn’t do humor quite as well as Tennant or Eccleston, but this episode proved me wrong. His annoyed and defensive banter with Robin Hood, especially when they were in the Sheriff’s prison together, was a delight. In fact, I thought the episode had a very David Tennant/Tenth Doctor feel to it in both the pacing and the humor.

Ben Miller was outstanding as the Sheriff of Nottingham. He also looks so much like Anthony Ainley that I half expected the Sheriff to be revealed as the Master, “The King’s Demons”-style!

Wow, three episodes of Doctor Who in a row that I’ve enjoyed? I’m almost getting my hopes up that everything that annoyed me so badly in the last three seasons has been remedied. Almost. More on that in a moment.

**MINOR SPOILERS FOLLOW**

As enjoyable as I thought “Robot of Sherwood” was, there were a few things that tripped me up. First of all, the plot (such as it is), which involves a crashed spaceship whose occupants are secretly manipulating the locals into building a giant circuit that will repair their craft, is identical — and I mean identical — to the plot of the 2008 Tenth Doctor episode “The Fires of Pompeii” (which also starred Peter Capaldi, incidentally!). Additionally, we just had a story that featured a ship of robots from the future that crashed on Earth while looking for “The Promised Land” two episodes ago with “Deep Breath.” Why do the same thing again so quickly? Is it going to be a theme this season, or is it just laziness?

Don’t get me started on the use of the golden arrow at the end, when the ship was in danger of crashing. Just…don’t. It’s a solution so ridiculous it pulled me right out of the story, in which I was otherwise fully and happily engaged.

Let’s talk about Clara a moment, and how the writers don’t seem to be able to give her character any consistency. For example, she used to be a nanny, but now she’s a school teacher. (This sudden shift in jobs isn’t unusual for the Steven Moffat-run era. You might remember the previous companion, Amy, had about a hundred different jobs over the course of her time on the show, to the point where she actually seemed to have a new one every time we saw her.) Speaking of Clara’s time as a nanny, whatever happened to those kids she was taking care of, anyway? The ones she told about the Doctor and took on an adventure in the TARDIS? (I don’t actually expect to see them again or have their plot lines carried forward, because this, too, isn’t unusual for the Moffat-run era. How many seemingly important characters have been introduced only to be dropped right away? How many of them were in the episode “Dinosaurs on a Spaceship” alone?)

Anyway, my point is that there’s not a lot of character consistency with Clara, and the reason it comes up for me again now is because in “Deep Breath,” Clara mentions the only poster she had on her bedroom wall as a teenager was of Marcus Aurelius (likely she means posters of statues, not of the man himself, who lived in the mid-100s AD, long before cameras were invented). She’s obviously a big fan of this Roman emperor and philosopher. In fact, when we see her at the start of the 50th anniversary special “Day of the Doctor,” she’s teaching Aurelius’ philosophy to her class. So when the Doctor asks her who, out of anyone in time and space, she would like to meet, of course she says Marcus Aurelius Robin Hood. What?

To me, this is a weird oversight on the writers’ part. Why not have her mention Robin Hood instead of Marcus Aurelius in “Deep Breath” so her choice doesn’t feel so out of the blue? Or why not have her ask to meet Marcus Aurelius but they wind up in Sherwood Forest? Or why not just have them wind up in Sherwood Forest without all the “who do you want to meet?” preamble, since the TARDIS tends to materialize in random times and locations anyway? Maybe I’m being too much of a stickler, but it bothered me.

Not enough to make me dislike “Robot of Sherwood,” though. This is a very fun adventure, full of comedy and swashbuckling. The Twelfth Doctor even breaks out some Venusian aikido at one point, just like the Third Doctor used to do. Add to that a mention of a miniscope from the 1973 Third Doctor serial “Carnival of Monsters,” and the Jon Pertwee-like aspects of Capaldi’s Doctor are really brought to the fore. And as I mentioned before, Clara — despite her inconsistencies — is a much more interesting character now that she can just be herself and not saddled with being the “impossible girl.”

Unfortunately, I heard a rumor that the next episode, “Listen,” brings back the “impossible girl” nonsense in such an egregious way that, if it’s true, will likely launch me into an epic anti-Steven Moffat rant to end all epic anti-Steven Moffat rants. You’ve been warned.

 

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