Dead Man Bloggin’, Sept 11, 2024
Hey everyone!
On October 1st, the culmination of more than two years of incredibly hard work will be released on Amazon (and wide-release across global booksellers on the 2nd): NecroTek 1.0: Necromancer’s Bullet!
Bullet is a major, major shift for me as an author and at the same time, feels incredibly familiar. I’ll do another post in the coming days about the book, the characters, the plot – but for now, let’s talk the genres!
I grew up reading and playing Shadowrun, the tabletop RPG and novel series set in a futuristic earth where magic and technology combined in a mix of cybernetics and otherworldly influences across a backdrop of a world gone corporate. There are few things I’ve ever read that have managed to take that idea and mix not only the brutality of street life with the fantastical concepts of elven, dwarven, orc, vampires and then throw in advanced tech with it. The Netflix movie Bright is the only thing that really compares, at least to me.
In fact, there’s been so little that I’ve seen that has ever compared that I decided it was time to write the kind of book that I want to read.
Enter Anthony Pierson – a former intelligence officer in the US Army. He’s enjoying his other-than-honorable medical discharge while living in a sh*tty apartment in a sh*tty slum in the largest mega-corp-stylized city in 2057 USA. In Anthony’s world, magic has been a part of human society forever, even if it only was given “official recognition” in 1970.
The Gates of Hell opening up sorta forced the point.
With Anthony, black-magic also means black-ops. In his role as an intelligence officer, he was trained as a necromancer; so I have a character that is capable of using cybernetic technology embedded in his body to compliment the ability to get into a dead guy’s head and learn what he or she knows.
Building a world around this concept was incredibly fun. What happens when Daemon Lords leave Hell but decide that Earth really is a better place to live? What happens when torture chambers are replaced with boardooms and status reports? How does humanity cope with halfbreed demon/human people who just want to live in modern society?
How does society change when everything is an advertisement, when if you can pay your way for it you can turn your body into anything you want, and how do you find a way to make a living if you don’t want to just be some corporate drone?
On a personal note, this is something I’ve had boiling for literally years. It’s gone through two extensive rewrites, and one was so heavy that I effectively cut an actual third of the book and rewrote it over a four month period. It is the very definition of ‘labor of love,’ even when the content of it is anything but.
With Necromancer’s Bullet, I’m shoving you into a brand new American dystopian cityscape in the Gulf of Mexico. It’s an urban fantasy/cyberpunk thrill ride with a bit of horror, a lot of violence, over three-hundred utterances of “f*ck,” a six-decade dead former Texan Marshal that goes by the name Marshal Marshall Blackburn, and a forty-year-old asshole that just wanted his d*ck sucked before everything in his life went straight to Hell.
If he’s lucky, it’ll be Hell and back.
But he may not be that lucky.
Enter Anthony’s world on October 1st, 2024!
Necromancer’s Bullet by Joshua E. B. Smith
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0DCGGRVBG