The Real Literary Stalkers

Guest post for Morbidly Beautiful, on a subject that I’ve had in mind for some considerable time, as there is a wealth of interesting material, and it ties in well with the story in Literary Stalker.

Stephen King constructed the most famous fictional literary stalker ever, in his novel Misery. But he had several real ones too!

Find out more about the stalking of Stephen King, Peter James, James Lasdun and other authors. Morbidly Beautiful have done an excellent job with the layout, text headings and quotes, and have furnished a wealth of great photographs.

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My novel Literary Stalker constructs a fictional scenario where a writer/fan becomes embittered by a series of negative encounters with others in the writing game, and in one particular case he tips over into becoming a stalker, heading inexorably towards bloody revenge.

In fiction, a variation on this theme has been explored most famously by Stephen King, who gave us literary stalker Annie Wilkes in Misery, and brought to life every paranoid writer’s worst nightmare. But what about in real life? Are there actual literary stalkers out there, preying on illustrious scribes? You bet there are!

Read more on Morbidly Beautiful

 

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GetWordy Review of Literary Stalker

Another generous review on the Literary Stalker Blog Tour from Laura James of GetWordy. A disturbing reading experience and social media anxieties are themes that emerge, once again!

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Where to begin. I will read anything and everything as long as the theme is somewhat disturbing – yeah ok I know that might make me kinda weird but I know what I like – and after reading the synopsis of Literary Stalker, a disturbed read is what I thought I’d get. Let me tell you, Roger didn’t disappoint in that regard at all.

Basically we follow Nick as he tries to write his great masterpiece, with an unsupportive partner and thoughts of revenge on a certain few, we are with him as this latest (& he hopes the best) work is written.

The novel Nick is writing, The Facebook Murders, is about an author, Jago,  who is planning on killing his critics and using that experience to plot his own novel. Hats off to Roger for writing a novel, within a novel, how he kept things straight in his head is beyond me, man Roger has some skill. Saying that, I was confused on occasion as I found I had to re-read bits to check whether the killings were fictional or actual but to be honest by that point I didn’t care…

Read more on GetWordy

My Movie-Buff Literary Stalker

Guest Post for GetWordy on the Literary Stalker Blog Tour. Thanks to Laura James for hosting.

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When I constructed my literary stalker, Nick Chatterton, I tried to make him unlike myself in many ways – ‘…so people won’t think he’s me’ – as Nick says about his own fictional creation, Jago Farrar. I made Nick thirty-eight, gay, unemployed, with a full head of long hair, borderline personality disorder and a criminal record – none of which apply to myself. I also gave him a different profile as a writer to my own, though there are some similarities (we both wrote horror short stories for small press magazines). But in one particular area I fashioned Nick very much in my own image – I gave him my taste in movies and made him a movie buff.

My own background is art college, film school, and work in broadcast TV and video production as an editor and director; and later I added film and DVD reviewing and feature writing to the skill set. I’ve loved ‘the movies’ since childhood, when I saw films such as Jason and the Argonauts and The Wizard of Oz on the big screen, way back in the early 1960s. Since then my tastes have developed along certain lines, and I’m known as an aficionado of the weird, surreal and offbeat in cinema, a tendency which touches upon art movies, horror and crime, science fiction and metafiction. I also love film noir and intelligent gangster and dark transgressive movies generally. So I bequeathed these interests to Nick, and thus I was able to add another layer to Literary Stalker, where the films Nick uses in his plots and references in his daily life become adjuncts to the storytelling, bouncing the ideas around the text as though in a hall of mirrors…

Read more on GetWordy

Theatre of Blood (1973) w/ author Roger Keen

‘Theatre of Blood and Literary Stalker’, my guest post for Machine Mean on the Blog Tour, deals with the key influence of the film on the book, whilst performing a review and an analysis of what we love about this classic. Big thanks to Thomas S. Flowers and Chad Clark.

Machine Mean

I had the basic plot idea for Literary Stalker – a bad writer with grudges who takes revenge on selected colleagues – many years before I wrote the novel, but it remained on the back burner because it seemed too simplistic. Then I had the further idea of making the work a pastiche, with showcased references to films and other novels, very much in the style of Quentin Tarantino. Having fun developing this, one film in particular popped into my mind – one I hadn’t actually viewed for decades, but which I remembered fondly from way back in the 1970s and ’80s. It was Theatre of Blood, and I got the DVD and re-watched it, several times. The rest, as they say, is history. 

The blueprint of a vengeful actor, dispensing justice to the critics who’ve disparaged him, using Shakespeare’s plays, matched my idea; but rather than simply copy…

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Reviews In The Machine : Literary Stalker, by Roger Keen

Nice in-depth incisive review from Chad Clark at Machine Mean.

Machine Mean

It’s a pretty rare occurrence for me to be scared by a book anymore. And I’m not saying that as a way of bragging, just that after you’ve seen so many horror movies and read or written so many stories, it gets harder and harder to get to that emotional place.

That being said, it’s well within the realm of possibility that I can be disturbed by a book. And this brings us to the topic for today, Literary Stalker, by Roger Keen.

This is the story of a young, aspiring author, Nick, whose current work is a book titled, The Facebook Murders, in which his fictional protagonist goes on a small murder spree, killing people who had wronged him or tried to damage his career. I find stories relating to stalkers to be unsettling enough, especially in the social media landscape. Keen managed to take this concept and make…

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The Literary Stalker’s Take on Gun Control

Extract from Chapter 6: Clichéd Ways of Obtaining a Gun

In debates about gun crime and gun control, one old chestnut comment keeps cropping up: It’s not guns that kill people, it’s people that kill people. What an idiotic thing to say! When you have a gun in your hand, you know full well it’s the gun that’s going to do the killing and you’re just a passenger. How would ‘you’, minus the gun, go about killing someone? Grab them by the throat and try to strangle them? Pound them to death with your fists? Kick them to death? Use the Five Point Palm Exploding Heart Technique? Or use a lesser weapon, such as a knife or baseball bat?

All are possibilities to be sure, but none are exactly easy and inevitably involve some level of physical prowess, fighting knowledge and skills. What’s more, once you embark on such an attack, your victim is going to take evasive action, retaliate and perhaps overpower you. Taking all this into account, it’s highly likely that ‘you’ wouldn’t consider it advisable to undertake the killing attempt at all. But if you possess a gun, it’s different. With one of those, you can stand a distance away from your victim, and providing you can point the thing straight and hold it as though you mean business, you have the complete upper hand. And if you’ve got the balls to pull the trigger…well. How much percentage of the kill would be down to ‘you’ and how much down to the gun?

So what does the Literary Stalker do? He steals a World War II Webley service revolver from his great uncle and uses it to murder three of his intended victims. But hey, it only happens in a novel-within-a-novel. More info: Darkness Visible Publishing.