JAMES COOPER

 

Cover Art: Ben Baldwin

Due from Crowswing Books in April 2007

Launch Date: April 28, 2007, Alt-Fiction Festival, Derby

ISBN: 1-9051-0019-1

Price: £10

 

The Midway. A forsaken world, stalked by its own shadow, that no human has the power to deny. It exists in the margins of human experience, the grey skies and rain nourishing its life forms, its landscape reverberating with the distant thrum of machines.

 

For Justice Nawrocki, life is simpler. His carnival pitches its tent in the darkest corners of the English countryside, where his collection of freaks and human curiosities attracts countless late-night disciples eager to have their prejudice confirmed.

 

Stella Oddstock, long-established as Nawrocki’s Human Magnet, is finding carnival life less and less appealing. Her son is being used as a pawn by Nawrocki in a game that will have horrifying consequences for them all, and she can feel herself being reclaimed by the Midway, a place she was drawn to many years ago, at the exact moment she was giving birth to her son.

 

When she meets Lazarus, a failed suicide whom Stella rescues from a ditch, they find themselves pursued into the bowels of the Midway by agents of the Inveterartis, the mysterious force at the very heart of the darkness they despise.

 

Only in the Midway will they discover their true calling.

 

Only in the Midway will they risk everything they have to survive.

 

 

The Midway is James Cooper’s debut novel of dark fantasy, an epic tale of freaks, resurrected divinities, and glamours half-hidden to the world, in a place wrestled into being from the night. 

 

 

"Though James Cooper's love of the traditional horror tale is evident in his writing, his fiction is anything but formulaic. His work is thought-provoking, passionate, slightly off-beat, and delves as deeply into the often very real horror of the human condition as it does elements of the fantastic. A fresh new voice in dark fiction, James Cooper is a writer on the rise, and deservedly so"

 

- Greg F. Gifune, author of DOMINION, DEEP NIGHT, A VIEW FROM THE LAKE

 

 

 

James Cooper's debut novel will be published in April 2007 under the New Wave imprint. The author has delivered the 172,000 word manuscript after working on it for almost five years. Sean Wright holds his hands up in claiming to have discovered this highly talented author, stating: "Sometimes an unknown writer comes along whose work stuns you. James Cooper is an original voice in fantasy/horror, a new author who possesses not only a powerful imagination, but one who can tell a story that really grips the reader socially, morally and politically and refuses to let go. The Midway is an important novel, and James Cooper is an important new voice - one to be reckoned with."

 

"It is with the tentative turning of a key that miracles confess themselves and it is no coincidence that this is how most disclosures begin. Not with a bang, as academics would have us believe, but with an act of gentle penetration, a turn or two of a simple key. This is how it all started; this is where everything began. We forget sometimes that, over the years, it has been the opening of doors that has gradually set us free."

- The Midway: James Cooper