The Week in Review - Book Release Week

It's been seven days since the official release of Southern Gods. A lot of stuff has happened during that week. Let me recap it for you, in case you missed anything.

MONDAY, AUGUST 1st

Southern Gods was reviewed on Luca Veste's site, Guilty Conscience. He had to say this about SG:

It's exceptionally smart and sharp. Towards the end, it has some of the most shocking moments I've ever read. This story is dark. I mean it's as dark as dark can be. It contains some of the most horrific moments I've ever read in print. But, it's also beautiful...it's beautifully horrific. If there is such a thing.

Also, on Monday, I was lucky enough to appear in a guest blog on Stephen Blackmoore's L.A. NOIR. I indulge in a little navel gazery.

In his introduction, Stephen was kind enough to say this:

This is Lovecraftian Southern Gothic. It's got blues and family, horror and magic. I love this book. It doesn't shy away from horrors of family any more than it shies from the gibbering, squamous, eldritch-horror-from-the-stars type.

TUESDAY, AUGUST 2ND

On Tuesday, Erik Lundqvist reviewed Southern Gods. On the whole, he liked it, though he had some reservations. He said:

I suspect Southern Gods would make a kick ass movie with The Rock as Bull. Future novels by John Hornor Jacbos will pretty much automatically be added to the reading pile from now on. Any fan of horror will enjoy reading this book. But be warned, the book is best read wearing your wellies and rain coat so you can easily wash away the blood spatter afterwards.

Um, I don't know about The Rock. And it's interesting to see what other people think of the depictions of violence in your own work. While I felt it was nearing tame - with the exception of one scene - he felt it was overly gory. De gustebus non est disputandem.

WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 3rd

On Wednesday, I did an interview with The Qwillery. I said some stuff and I thought it sounded pretty good at the time.

You can check that out here.

Also, on Wednesday, Jimbo Mcleod, the proprietor of the Ginger Nuts of Horror review site put up a glowing review of Southern Gods. Jimbo said:

Jacob's has not forgotten that the heart of a good novel is a good story, and the story presented here is one worthy of high praise indeed. Too often a good story is swamped by unnecessary writing, writing that is just trying to be literate for the sake of it. Jacob's has struck the balance between strong assured, and powerful writing, and one hell of a good narrative.

THURSDAY, AUGUST 4th

Thursday is my duly appointed time to embloggen at The Night Bazaar. Which I did. I wrote about humor and the carnival tradition in literature. Heady stuff, and I channeled the scholar JHJ, lost sometime in 1994 after I graduated from college. My favorite bit of the blog?

Our lives are nasty, brutish, but long. We have ample time to savor our misery. Your life, your whole existence, will be lived in service to others, working for someone else until you begin to succumb to the slow oblivion that comes with being subsumed by a culture that cares only for appearance and consumption. You’ll grow fat, or painfully thin, your skin will crack and wither and you’ll even forget the memory of the blush of youth. And then, after a lifetime of toil and loneliness – yes loneliness because no one can ever truly know anyone else – you’ll die and people will forget what you look like as soon as the last shovel of dirt is tossed over your grave.

But you have to go to the blog and see how I then uplift your spirits. I break you down and then build you back up. It's the feel-good movie of the summer.

Also, on this date, Southern Gods hit #25 on the Hot New Releases on Amazon. Could still be there now, I don't know. But I do know this: tracking my sales is gonna drive me CRAZY!

FRIDAY, AUGUST 5th

Friday, the honorable Jedidiah Ayres was kind enough to mention Southern Gods in his Barnes & Noble Ransom Notes blog. He said:

Southern Gods by John Hornor Jacobs is flat-out one of the scariest books I’ve read in a long time; a sweaty, sultry trek through the secret geographical and spiritual places of the American South fueled by a delta blues soundtrack so transcendent and graphically conjured you’ll not be able to shake reverberations of the spectral tunes you’ve never actually heard for weeks (and the dreams they’ll conjure will keep your local mediums, pharmacists and psychoanalysts in the manner they’re accustomed to for years).

Also, on Friday, we discovered the audio sample to Southern Gods on the Brilliance Audio site. Let me tell you, it's bizarre hearing someone else read your words aloud.

SATURDAY, AUGUST 6th

Tom Picirilli was kind enough to review Southern Gods on his blog, The Cold Spot. I think the greatest thing about becoming a novelist is hearing from people you've read, you've idolized in some fashion, reading your work and enjoying it. Pic said this:

If you dig crime/horror/dark fantasy/southern gothic crossover (and who doesn’t?) written with a confident voice and a haunting, poignant edge, pick up John Hornor Jacobs’s debut novel SOUTHERN GODS. I recommend it wholeheartedly and look forward to whatever else Jacobs presents to us next.

SUNDAY, AUGUST 7th

Sunday was a day of rest, with no news.

MONDAY, AUGUST 8th

Peter Andrew Leonard was kind enough to interview me on The Maneating Bookworm, which, BTW, is a fantastic book review site. You should bookmark it. Here's a little snippet of my interview:

JHJ: I don’t write with any visual medium in mind. The hard part of writing is transferring experience – even false, imaginary experience – into prose. So, there’s more than just the visual that goes into effective writing, in my humble opinion. Conveying an experience takes in sight, of course, but there are so many more sensations that feed into memory – the smell of grass and the sound of wind and the far off howl of a jet passing in the sky, the invisible pressure of sunshine on skin and the taste of spring air on the tongue. All these non-visual cues going into experience that are far more intrinsic to sense-memory and hook the reader not in their brain - like most vision does - but somewhere behind their navel. Viseral, is the word, I believe.

And, on this date in history, I wrote and posted the blog you are currently reading. How's that for meta?

BREAKING NEWS!

Just learned that my old friend, Joe Howe aka @kentallard1 has posted another review on his awesome horror review site, DEAD IN THE SOUTH. He is too kind, saying:

A lot of writers these days seem to miss a central truth about their vocation: It is a combination of art and craft. They embrace the art side, telling stories, but shy away from the hard work of crafting words together in just the right order, the tedious business of finding the proper phrase to communicate to the reader what the writer is attempting to say. John is not one of those people. He labors hard at finding the right word, the appropriate phrase. Southern Gods was already a good book when I first read it in an early draft, better than the vast majority of what’s published today, but John was willing to perform surgery on it to make it even better. That dedication to his craft is going to make John an important writer, not just in the relatively small horror field, but in all of fiction.

I'm blushing. Wow.

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I'd like to thank all of those people who were so kind to either allow me to promote Southern Gods through their venues or helped me to promote it through reviews. I cannot express how grateful I am for all of your support.

Thank you.