Sunday Spotlight: Marc Nash, author of An Eye for an Eye for an Eye

Sunday 24 May 2015

Sunday Spotlight is a weekly scheme I am running to bring publicity to lesser known authors who, in the book blogging community, it is important to support. If you are an author and you wish to be considered for it please email me at emily.confessionsofa
bookaholic@gmail.com with 'Author Spotlight' in the subject line.

Visiting with us at Confessions of a Bookaholic today is Marc Nash, author of the dystopian novel An Eye for an Eye for an Eye.

About Marc

20 years in the counterculture working at Rough Trade Record Shop, now working in freedom of expression NGO world. I hope my books are more than just the sum of the above. I used to be a playwright, but then started writing more for dancers and physical theatre performers. I like a challenge and I like to move out of my comfort zone. Now I’m a novelist and am writing more ‘voice’ than I ever did as a playwright. Go figure!

Find Marc on Goodreads | Amazon | Blog


Interview

Hi there Marc!
Tell us something about An Eye for an Eye for an Eye that the synopsis doesn't cover.
That it’s a police procedural without an actual detective at its heart and is actually about the death of procedure. It’s a dystopia which is in fact not too far further from becoming a reality in our world if certain current events continue to play out. And it has paranormal elements which are explored as to whether they can be truly called paranormal or not. So it’s both three genres and not those genres at the same time!

Tell us about your genre(s) and why they interest you?
I don’t restrict myself to any single genre. This one was dystopian because I was thinking a lot about the civil unrest in countries like Greece and Italy due to the economic cuts imposed by their governments as the Eurozone hit financial trouble. I just imagined what it would be like to take that to its logical conclusion and that ended up in a dystopia!

Who is your favorite character from all of your works?
Karen Dash from my novel “A,B&E”. She’s a tough woman who’s had to hold her own in two very male worlds of academia and criminal gangsterism, through a mixture of being as tough as the men, while also retaining enough femininity to give her that little bit extra over the men. She’s funny and clever and yet also ground down by the male worlds she has to operate in. She directly addresses the reader too, as if you’re holding a conversation with her.

What sets An Eye for an Eye for an Eye apart from other works?
It is that most difficult of things, a genre work which has high literary content. It goes deep into character motivations; there are thoughts about man’s relationship with man when our creature comforts are denied us and lots of metaphors and images to give a real sense of the physical environment. And as already mentioned, it subverts its genres as much as conforms to them.

What author do you believe inspired your work the most?
None specifically, though this book only came about because I was so irritated by a book I read that claimed to be both genre and literary and was really bad, that I sat down the next day to write one of my own. There was no planning, I just started writing, though many of the ideas and themes must have been swirling about in my head, my irritation just brought them altogether to produce this book! The first draft came together really quickly.

What is the best feedback you've got on your work?
I’ve been described as “thought-provoking” and “use(s) the reader’s grey cells like a hockey puck. There is no slacking off you have to pay attention”. A critical review for a collection of my flash but which really tickled me was “just strings of words that took up space and left me none the wiser afterwords”. I really liked the first half of that statement as a description of all literature!

You say you do flash fiction, tell us about that.
1000 words maximum to tell a story is just so liberating rather than restrictive. With no time to set the scene, no room for lengthy descriptions of character, it places such a high value on the words themselves. With so few to play with, the words have to do so much work and this emphasises metaphor and imagery which allow you do that. I’ve now written 200 stories, mainly one a week and it’s really influenced my longer novels as well. I’ve published four collections of flash; many of the stories will knock your socks off in terms of what we imagine the structure of a story to be. With flash anything is possible, in a way that couldn’t be sustained over the length of a novel.

Your cover for An Eye for an Eye for an Eye is very unique, how does it link to your book?
It was collaboration between me and the artist Little Appleseed. I let her choose the central image she thought appropriate from the book and then we honed it between us. Mezcal is a Latin American drink like tequila in which a worm is added to the mixture. Supposedly if the worm is preserved by the Mezcal, it shows it’s good quality alcohol! The worm is also said to be hallucinogenic if swallowed. Like many detectives, the protagonist in the book is a heavy drinker and due to his emotional state often looks to crawl inside the bottle to be with the worm. I love the way Little Appleseed echoed the worm in the bottom of the bottle with the colouration of the eye on the label. We also came up with the idea of reversing the author’s name looking through the bottle glass. I like covers in which title and author name are organically part of the image, rather than take away from the overall effect.

What other works should we look out from you in the future?
Well I have a healthy back catalogue of seven other books. I’m trying to get a book of short stories published traditionally, while I have enough flash stories for my fifth collection and perhaps my strongest yet. I am also collaborating with a video designer on a kinetic typography video of one of my flash stories. I’ve done this once before and represents a very different and fresh way of telling a story, by emphasising the letters that make up the words, since these are what move in kinetic typography. My first video is here.

If you could invite three authors to lunch, past and present, who would they be?
Samuel Beckett definitely for his humor and take on the world. William Burroughs just because he was so out there and would have tons of anecdotes. And Franz Kafka my favorite author of all, though he’d probably refuse or complain about the food because that’s just the kind of guy he probably was! I think he’d get on well with Beckett though, they’re equally dark.

Is there anything else you want to tell the readers of Confessions of a Bookaholic?
Just thank you to readers and you wonderful book bloggers for all the support you give to us indie authors! You guys make it all worthwhile.

Thank you for joining us on Confessions of a Bookaholic!

About an Eye for an Eye for an Eye
You can tell a lot about a society from its murders. And Simon Moralee can tell everything from its victims. He has the gift- or is it a curse?- of being able to recover a vision of the last thing murder victims had imprinted on their minds before death. It means he can identify their killers and describe them to the police to secure a one hundred percent clean-up rate. A gift he first discovered as a teenager when cradling his butchered mother in his arms.

His financially bankrupt society leaps at the opportunity his gift provides, by cutting the level of policing and detection back to the bone, as a yet another cost-saving measure. The few remaining policemen serve as Simon’s minders as they seek to protect their most valuable asset and the one remaining celebrity the State can promote to their citizens as a good news story. Only people are losing interest in his exploits, as they lose hope for their society with its murder rate spiralling beyond Simon’s ability to keep pace. And into this numbers game emerges a new threat, when a criminal mastermind with a psychic power of his own, challenges Simon in a psychological joust to the death...

Find An Eye for an Eye for an Eye on Goodreads | Amazon 

Marc has kindly agreed to a giveaway of An Eye for an Eye for an Eye plus the flash fictions Long Stories Short and 52FF. Enter below! The first winner selected will win AEFAEFAE, the second LSS and the third 52FF.

a Rafflecopter giveaway

Make sure to let Marc and I know what you thought of the spotlight in the comments!

If you are an author and want to be spotlighted drop me an email. Don't forget to share my spotlight posts wherever you can, it's really important to support the lesser known author community! Also if you want to be included in my scheme then you need it to be popular enough for you to have maximum publicity!

If you do share my scheme let me know where and I will post an endorsement of your blog/book/anything in exchange on my Twitter account.

4 People dared to comment.:

Anonymous said...

Interesting. Looking forward to reading the book. kamundsen44@yahoo.com

Anonymous said...

It sounds like an exciting read! Violetgoop@gmail.com

Unknown said...

Beautiful blog! Love the colors. Nice interview, sounds like it'd be an interesting read.

Emily said...

Thank you very much!

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