Monday, July 25, 2011

The Return of Drawing Dead

Original Cover Design

Most of you who visit this blog know me as the author of several "young adult" novels, but I’ve also written eight novels for "old adults." The first five of these are now officially out of print (boo-hoo), so I’m reissuing them as ebooks, beginning with my first published novel, Drawing Dead.

I began writing Drawing Dead while I was taking a writing class from Mary Logue, to whom the book is dedicated. In fact, I’ve dedicated several of my books to Mary, which says nothing good about my number of close personal friends, but a great deal of good about my relationship with Mary.

Drawing Dead was a critical success. It got a bunch of good reviews. Marilyn Stasio, in the New York Times Book Review, opened her piece with, “Whatever Pete Hautman was doing before he wrote Drawing Dead, he was wasting his time.” It was selected as a NYT Notable Book for 1993, and I thought I was gonna be the next Stephen King. 

I wrote four more books in the Joe Crow/Sam O’Gara/Axel Speeter series. Those books were also kindly reviewed, but sales were modest.  I became interested in other varieties of literary experience, and eventually they went out of print, to be consigned to the backwaters of eBay and your friendly neighborhood used bookstore curmudgeon.

Now, thanks to the miracles of digital technology, you can read Drawing Dead on your kindle, Nook, iPad, or other device.  For the Kindle version, click here.  For the Nook version, click here.  The other four books in the series will be available soon—assuming I sell enough copies of Drawing Dead to justify the expense of converting them.

My Hack-job e-Cover
For those of you who have read only my YA work, I should mention that in Drawing Dead the “f-word” and its variations occur 159 times. There are other discourteous words as well. Just so you know.

If you’d like to check out what sort of literary conceit you might be subjecting yourself to, Amazon lets you download the first four chapters to your device for free.

*Right now it’s only available on Kindle and Nook, but the other e-formats will be available soon.

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