Today we have an extract of a book that many fantasy fans have been keeping a close-eye on, Wolfhound Century. Those who have already received the book (mostly my fellow bloggers) have been quick to provide it with 4/5 star reviews and demand Mr Higgins get on with writing the sequel:

“Very dark, very gritty and very atmospheric. Wolfhound Century is also a book free of genre constraints, allowing for a great original and entertaining read. Top Notch stuff by Peter Higgins.” ~The Founding Fields

So, when Mr Higgins, author of the book, offered to provide us with an introduction to Wolfhound Century and a copy of the first chapter to share with our readers, how could I resist? So, now, I hand you over to Peter:

Wolfhound Century merges SF and fantasy with a thriller story and aspects of early 20th century Russia and Europe. The hero of the story, Vissarion Lom – a police investigator in a provincial town, a decent man working for a totalitarian state – finds himself summoned to the capital city, Mirgorod.

Mirgorod is where SF and fantasy, thriller and history, meet. It’s a city of intellectuals and revolutionaries and secret police, of marching crowds and modernist painters, propaganda cinema and noisy railway stations. It’s also a place of giants and rusalkas, dangerous sentient rain, unworldly technologies and dark alien voices.

Beneath Mirgorod’s cobbled streets lie any number of cities in the SF and fantasy tradition: Nessus, Viriconium, New Crobuzon, Ambergris. And in the alleyways lurk shadows of Kafka’s Prague, Isherwood’s Berlin, the Vienna of The Third Man, even Dickens’ London. But Mirgorod has historical underliers too, which in Wolfhound Century are often nearer the surface. Mirgorod inhabits the gaps between St Petersburg and Leningrad, between soft city and hard city.

St Petersburg, the shifting, unreal city, has been present in Russian literature for centuries: it is the elusive, hallucinatory graveyard of dreams of Pushkin, Gogol and Dostoevsky. But there’s also another city in the same place, Leningrad, which is truly hard. Leningrad is a city of hunger and assassination; revolution and war; the dispossession of the aristocrats and violent struggles between different versions of the future. And Leningrad and St Petersburg coexist. They are the same city, and they resist each other.

When Lom arrives in Mirgorod, he confronts the violence and cruelty that keeps the totalitarian regime in place. He meets a woman – Maroussia Shaumian – who lives in a bleak apartment and works in a factory making uniforms and wants to change the world. Wolfhound Century is about opening up, the call to adventure, seeing things in bigger ways, exploring the edges of what it means to be human.

Peter Higgins

Note: You will probably need to hit the ‘open in new window’ button on the top right of the book below to be able to read the extract full screen, without any annoying tabbing 🙂

http://fantasy-faction.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/Wolfhound-Chapter-1.pdf

If you’ve enjoyed Wolfhound Century , be sure to head over to Amazon to pick up a copy!