MAYHEM, MAGIC AND MANIAC DWARVES
Malix Shandy, the best-looking scoundrel in the kingdom, sets off on a hopeless quest to find the dreaded Fury Clock. If he doesn't find it in seven days, he'll suffer a fate worse than death. Teamed up with an enormous ogre and a psychotic dwarf, Shandy starts to think maybe death would be restful after a week in such company. But he doesn't have time to die, not with all the necromancers, vampires, and dragons out to get him.
Brimming with romance, monsters, magic, and beautiful wenches, The Fury Clock is a humorous and rollicking adventure in the tradition of Terry Pratchett and Terry Brooks.
Interview with the Author
Q: Did someone force you to write this book?
A: No, it wasn't like the cartel had a gun to my head. I think it was mostly due to some bad shrimp scampi I ate one evening. Those blasted shrimp kept me up all night. As you know, the mind wanders at 2 in the morning. I could hear the clock ticking down the hall in the kitchen. Tick tick tick... It was ticking like it was coming for me. Like a clock tiptoeing closer on metal-tipped spider legs. My mind started thinking about clocks and ogres, dwarfs with attitude problems--you know, all that stuff every insomniac thinks about late at night.
Q: A lot of your other books are tradition epic fantasy in the tradition of Tolkien, Robert Jordan and all those guys. Why all this crazy humor?
A: I enjoy reading and writing epic fantasy a lot, true, but I've always been a big fan of humorous writing. It seems to be a harder kind of book to write, which is why there's a lot of great epic fantasy out there these days--Rothfuss, Butcher, etc--but there isn't that much humorous fantasy. Piers Anthony wrote quite a lot, and Terry Brooks wrote a few with his Magic Kingdom for Sale series, but they're fairly unique. As a kid, I grew up on Douglas Adams and Pratchett. Great writers. Adams should be canonized. I'm a big fan of Wodehouse as well, in addition to Dave Barry and Richard Powell. Powell is not so well-known these days, but he's arguably the funniest American humorist after Twain. Among others, he wrote Don Quixote USA and Pioneer Go Home, which are unbeatable. So, er... what was the question? Oh, yeah. Once I started thinking about smart alec ogres and all that, a humorous fantasy was inescapable. Despite my love of the epic fantasy genre, it has a lot of sacred cows that need skewering. Which I did.
Q: Are you going to write another book to go with The Fury Clock?
A: Definitely. Something to do with entitled wizards and stuck-up princesses and dirty farm boys who think they're somehow special and, therefore, are meant to save the world. It'll happen. I just need a few more hours added to each day.
