Posts Tagged: Mark Charan Newton

Art

Cover Art | A Couple of Covers for Mark Charan Newton

By Aidan Moher December 9th, 2011
NIGHTS OF VILLJAMUR by Mark Charan Newton (German Edition) The Book of Transformations by Mark Charan Newton

Has any one had as high a book release:cover art ratio as Mark Charan Newton over the past two or three years? Seems like every couple of months I’m posting new covers for his novels! This time around it’s the (beautiful) cover for the German edition of Nights of Villjamur and the upcoming UK paperback cover for The Book of Transformations. We all know how I feel about hooded dudes on the covers of Fantasy novels, but I think it works fairly well this time around; it’s simple, the typography is good and it’s a mile better than the ninja girl that almost graced the cover of the hardback. The cover for the German edition of Nights of Villjamur is probably my favourite of all of Mark’s covers (though the Great Wall of China does seem to stick out like a sore thumb.)

All in all, good covers.

News

An Aside | More News on DRAKENFELD by Mark Charan Newton

By Aidan Moher December 5th, 2011

The Book of Transformations by Mark Charan NewtonVia an interview between Newton and Rowena Cory Daniells:

The lead character, Lucan Drakenfeld, is a bit like a young lawyer-slash-detective, and certainly the polar opposite of a private eye (if anything, he’s a public eye). I’m really trying to steer away from noir pastiche because I feel that would be disrespectful to crime readers. The book is as much a crime novel as it is a fantasy novel. Imagine a mainstream writer trying their hand at a fantasy novel, and filled it with a paint-by-numbers story – they’d be strung up by the fanbase, which is why I’m not doing a paint-by-numbers crime novel, either.

Very much looking forward to this. Glad to see, also, that Newton’s a smart enough fellow to actively avoid falling into the tropes and cliches of the noir/crime genre. Some of the best moments on Newton’s first novel, Nights of Villjamur were the noirish mystery elements fused with Fantasy in investigator Rumex Jeryd’s storyline. Newton is playing to his strengths by embracing that kind of character and story (even if Jeryd did sometimes fall into those recognizable tropes that Newton refers to in this latest interview.)

Feature Article

Article | On Genre Diversity (or, Why Mark Charan Newton was Right)

By Aidan Moher October 5th, 2010
Nights of Villjamur by Mark Charan Newton

This article was originally written for and published at SFSignal. Go check it out!

Recently, Mark Charan Newton, author of Nights of Villjamur, as he’s wont to do, stirred some feathers when he challenged several bloggers to diversify their book coverage, to shift focus from all the frontlist new releases and give more coverage to the wonderful backlist of the genre. Long story short, the blogosphere can only handle so many reviews of Mockingjay by Suzanne Collins, The Way of Kings by Brandon Sanderson and The Black Prism by Brent Weeks. Authors and novels of high profile get a huge push from their publishers, and that results in coverage from every blogger under the sun; Newton argues that it would do everyone (reader, author and reviewer alike) some good to look into the past.

Myself and Larry Nolen, from OF Blog of the Fallen, disagreed with Newton, at least in part. We agreed with Newton that diversification is a good thing, but that true diversification means so much more than just dipping your toe into the forgotten classics of the genre; rather, it’s about stepping outside the boundaries of the frontlist books (you know, those ones that are shoved down your throat through blogs, twitter, Facebook, newsletters, bookstore promotions and heft marketing budgets) and explore what else the genre has to offer, regardless of whether it was released today, a month ago or before the Toronto Maple Leafs won their last Stanley Cup (1967, for all you non-Hockey fans reading this). The Speculative Fiction genre has so much to offer that you could pick books out at random and never run out of good reading (granted, there’s an equal share of bad reading in there, but it’s good to experience that from time to time, to keep perspective), so why are we bloggers and reviewers often obsessed with keeping up with the times?

Of course, discussions on the ethics of bloggers are boring. But this call for diversification is something all readers might consider, whether they end up taking Newton’s advice or not.

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