N THE ALL-TOO-NEAR FUTURE: THE WORLD HAS FINALLY FELT THE KNOCKOUT PUNCH OF ECONOMIC MELTDOWN. IN ORDER TO STAVE OFF TOTAL COLLAPSE, THE ENTIRE GLOBE’S MONETARY DEALINGS ARE NOW OVERSEEN BY A MYSTERIOUS FINANCIAL CABAL KNOWN AS “THE BANK.” Against this backdrop, Detective Inspector Cass Jones (a good cop with very bad habits) is on the trail
of a serial killer called The Man of Flies while also trying to solve the mur- der/suicide of his brother’s family. Jones soon finds himself embroiled in a conspiracy involving The Bank, mephistophelean power brokers and his own checkered past. This is the world of The Dog-Faced Gods, a gritty, super- natural police procedural trilogy from UK author Sarah Pinborough, which began with 2010’s A Mat- ter of Blood and 2011’s The Shadow of the Soul, and wraps up with the recent release of The Cho- sen Seed (Gollancz Books). “I really wanted to take the story of Milton’s Par-
adise Lost and play with it,” she explains of the third and final book. “I also wanted to tie in the fi- nancial mess that the world was in and write some- thing very dystopian, but with real crime sensibilities.” Since her 2004 debut novel The Hidden, Pinbor-
ough’s name has been a consistent presence on bookstore shelves. It’s no small feat considering she initially juggled writing and a full-time position as a teacher – a rigorous schedule that she says required a lot of discipline. “It’s very hard to do a job as demanding as
teaching high school and knock out a novel every nine months, which I did for my first five horror nov- els,” she says. “Now I write more over a year, obviously,...but I still look back and think those were the toughest days.” In the past twelve months alone, Pinborough has written a second tie-
in novel to the BBC series Torchwood, the final novel of her YA trilogy The Nowhere Chronicles (under the pseudonym Sarah Silverwood), an episode of BBC crime drama New Tricks and a short story titled “The Screaming Room” for last year’s The Monster’s Corner: Stories Through Inhuman Eyes anthology. While she cites influences ranging from Stephen King to author/playwright Daphne Du Maurier (“The Birds”), pivotal to The Dog-
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Faced Gods was the work of an Irish author whose short story “The New Daughter” was adapted into an underrated Kevin Costner film of the same name (RM#108). “I’d have to say that John Connolly and his Charlie Parker novels were
a massive inspiration,” states Pinborough. “Until I’d read those and Michael Marshall Smith’s The Intruders, I hadn’t thought that you could really cross the weird with mainstream crime fiction.” In The Chosen Seed, readers finally have all the pieces to the puzzle Pinborough has been assembling over the past three years, as Cass is framed for a murder he didn’t commit and the grimy gumshoe reaches endgame with The Bank. Not surprisingly, there are plans to bring the tale to the small screen, and thanks to one of her biggest fans, an Amer- ican publication of the trilogy from Penguin is in the works (“I think it’s coming out in the States as The Forgotten Gods,” Pinborough notes). “I owe a debt of gratitude to F. Paul Wilson [The
Keep, the Repairman Jack novels],” says Pinbor- ough. “He’d read the books and emailed [Pen- guin] to say that they really needed to look at [The Dog-Faced Gods] again, and they then went on to buy the trilogy.” Fittingly, one of her many projects in develop-
ment is a collaboration with Wilson (“I can’t say too much about it, other than it’s a novella and pretty gritty and dark,” she allows), in addition to a two-part story scheduled for 2013. “Mayhem and Murder are a duology – yes, ap-
parently that is a word – set in late 19th-century London against the backdrop of the Jack the Rip-
per investigation,” she explains. “Whereas The Dog-Faced Gods are crime novels with a supernatural background, this is a spectral story with a crime subplot. It’s a huge amount of work because I’ve used people who really existed as my main characters, and they’re investigating a real crime, which was never solved. I’ve just put my own ‘What if?’ on it all.” With such a variety of real-life and supernatural scares intersecting in
her work, just what gives Pinborough the willies? “Everything scares me!” she exclaims. “I think what I probably try to exor- cise is fear itself – that’s never going to happen, but I’ll keep trying!”