Driven Press: July 2016

Sunday 31 July 2016

THE DOLL HARVEST - Release Day.

The Doll Harvest

Driven Press welcomes suspense novel The Doll Harvest by Ron Savage to our catalogue. It is available in paperback and e-book formats world-wide today.

Blurb

The twins say I’m perfect and rare. “We had to look very hard to find someone like you.” I am admired.

On the steps of her quiet brownstone, Nettie Harnell smells the sickly sweet scent of chloroform moments before she is abducted. When she awakens she’s in a dark basement chained to a post with nothing but memories of her mother and Paris to keep her company while she awaits her fate.

There is a shortage of medical donors in Philly, not that Carl and Vern Wachoski consider it a problem--it’s another business opportunity. Taking without permission has turned out to be incredibly lucrative, especially with Carl’s motto being “waste not, want not.” But Carl’s arrogance could cost them everything if they don’t watch out.

Dutch Harnell is no stranger to depression since the tragic and violent death of his wife and son eleven years before. Now it’s time for Dutch to pull himself together to save his one remaining family member, Nettie. With the help of Kapil Talpur, a young graduate student who witnessed the abduction, he finds himself drawn deeper into a world of greed and intrigue, where they can trust no one but themselves.

Excerpt

In less than two weeks it would be the eleventh anniversary of the shooting at John Parmentar Elementary. On April 2, 2005, a thirteen-year-old boy had walked into a West Philly elementary school with his dad’s submachine gun and five 30-round magazines. Dutch’s daughter was a kid then, two years older than what’s-his-face with the semi-automatic.

When Gunboy finished, he’d killed eleven students, two teachers, and himself. Blood was on everything: the polished gray floors, the mint-green walls. Blood flew onto the students and the teachers who were hiding under desks and behind doors. Later the hiders screamed and dug at the blood on their skin that wasn’t their blood. Later, two of the hiders killed themselves. They were ashamed they had hidden and lived. People who saw Gunboy said he was an overweight kid with scrubbed-pink skin and wild hair. He had on those Woody Allen type of glasses. Black-framed, over-sized. He’d worn an old gray sweatshirt and a pressed pair of chinos.

Reverend Harnell had an activist ministry. Even before the Parmentar attack, he would pack the church bus with parishioners and drive to any incidents that had firearms and damaged children. He wanted stronger regulations and a better way to treat mentally ill kids. Dutch wasn’t one to think every gun owner was going to shoot up the local bar or an elementary school. He didn’t want to change the Constitution, or stop people from protecting themselves and their families. He did think America had a lot of people, and buried in all those people were the fearful and the angry, and a lot of them were armed and looking for the great dark reason.

That he believed with all his heart.

. . . Gunboy, the reverend’s thought. That’s the name he deserves—just Gunboy.

Such a quiet, well-behaved kid—the stuff Dutch had heard. Nettie knew him, played a few video games with him, especially the one where you could steal cars and shoot up the town. People on the TV loved to blame video games for violence—that and movies. His daughter didn’t get it. The TV people liked to grab the easiest things, the things that didn’t get too personal. Oh. And drugs, too. Smoking that J, hittin’ that pipe. God, the horror of The Weed. Nettie had said she didn’t get Gunboy, either. She played the same games and saw the same summer movies, too—all the tough guys and comic book violence.

They were just games. They were just movies.

Nettie had told Dutch how she was like Gunboy, how her hair wouldn’t go right, just like him. And like him, kids made fun of her, too. She had a bad leg that was two and a half inches shorter than the other. The official name was LLD, Leg Length Discrepancy. Certain obtuse people in her class liked to tell “gimp” jokes. They found her deformity amusing. So, yeah, she got how fed up a guy could become, the way your average person could develop a “hey, suck on this” attitude. What she didn’t get was the last part, where you took a gun to school.

How did you leap from here to there?

Some adults and kids said Gunboy talked to himself as he shot people. There were children lying in the halls. Long smears of blood where kids had tried to drag themselves to safer places, but no places like that existed. Gunboy kept saying the same words over and over as he switched almost empty magazines for full ones.

“Double points,” he was reported saying. “Pow, got you! Got you! Got you! Double points.”

He was shooting at everything, people told the police—walls, overhead lights, closed glass and wooden doors. He shot kids and teachers who didn’t move. He shot kids and teachers who ran from him.

One of the teachers Gunboy killed was the reverend’s wife, Bess Harnell. One of the students was the reverend’s eight-year-old son, Saul.

The Doll Harvest is available now.

Buy Links

Paperback

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eBook

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Goodreads Giveaway

Here's an opportunity to win a paperback copy of The Doll Harvest on Goodreads. Enter here:

Goodreads Book Giveaway

The Doll Harvest

by Ron Savage

Giveaway ends August 06, 2016.
See the giveaway details at Goodreads.

Enter Giveaway

About Ron Savage

Ron Savage was a senior staff psychologist at a state mental health facility in Virginia and also had a private practice. Ron is the author of seven novels and two volumes of short stories, and has published more than 125 stories worldwide. He is the recipient of the Editor’s Circle Award in Best New Writing and was nominated for the Pushcart Prize. Ron is a member of PEN America and has also been a guest fiction editor for Crazyhorse. Some of his publications can be found in Film Comment, the North American Review, Shenandoah, the Baltimore Review, and the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction.

Find Ron Savage at:

http://www.ronsavage.net

Facebook:

http://www.facebook.com/ron.savage2

http://www.facebook.com/novelboy.ron.savage

Twitter:

@DoctorRonz

www.drivenpress.net

info@drivenpress.net

Tuesday 26 July 2016

Cover reveal . . . The Maddest Kind of Love

Driven Press is excited to reveal the cover for our latest upcoming release

The Maddest Kind of Love

The Maddest Kind of Love, from Australian author Christine Hillingdon, available 14 August 2016.

Blurb

When Carissa and Jaye fell in love, it wasn’t their time. She was planning a wedding and he was already married. Now, twenty years later, they find each other again, but he is planning a funeral and she is married. Cyberspace becomes a confidant to Carissa and Jaye’s staggeringly honest emails about themselves. Things they’ve never shared with anybody. And despite everything, Carissa falls for Jaye all over again.

Their affair is renewed, fraught with guilt and the dangers of being caught. This time it’s so different. Cancer, menopausal sex, and getting to know each other is frustrating, exciting, and exhausting, both mentally and physically. Life is more complicated. Is this the right time?

The Maddest Kind of Love will be available for pre-order soon.

Stay tuned!

Author

Christine Hillingdon was born in England and migrated with her family to Adelaide, South Australia in 1963.

She has been writing since school days and received a highly commended prize for a short story in her final year of high school. Since then she has had many short stories and poems published in a variety of literary magazines on and offline. Christine has won a few competitions along the way, including Poems for Passengers. This was a joint initiative between TransAdelaide and the Department for the Arts and Cultural Development, South Australia.

In 2011 Christine self-published a book through Peacock Publications about her twenty-seven years working as a psychiatric nurse at Hillcrest Hospital, South Australia. In May 2016, her children’s book titled The Girl From Far Away was published through Gnome On Pig Productions.

Her first novel of women’s fiction, The Maddest Kind of Love, is through Driven Press.

Find Christine at:

Facebook

Saturday 16 July 2016

Available for pre-order . . . THE DOLL HARVEST

Driven Press would like to announce that our upcoming release

The Doll Harvest
by Ron Savage

to be released on 31 July 2016, is now available for pre-order.

Blurb

The twins say I’m perfect and rare. “We had to look very hard to find someone like you.” I am admired.

Excerpt

The reverend liked sitting in the leather chair by his bedroom window with a paper cup of Glenkinchie 1991 neat—not that the staff at Pastureland Retreat would approve. Right now he watched the snow cover the tan meadow and the dark branches of trees, sipping his Scotch. Lots of oak and maple in Buck’s County. A horse pulled carriage was passing along the road by the mailbox, steam wafting up from the animal’s nostrils. Reverend Dutch Harnell had been thinking about his home in Philadelphia, a four-bedroom Mt. Airy town house he’d let go to live here. He was picturing his baby girl beneath her red and blue swing set after a warm rain. He and Bess had given their daughter the set many birthdays ago. The child had a thing for playing with the wet clay under the swings.

“Nettie doesn’t make mud pies,” Dutch remembered saying to his wife, looking out the kitchen window at their girl in the backyard. “You know, the way children do? Never does that. She works on shaping people. Whatever you call it, sculpting people. Did it right from the start. Perfect little people, little legs, little arms. Six years old, mind you, a peanut.”

“She’s a child playing in the dirt,” Bess would say. The reverend’s wife had curly black hair. Nettie had that same hair, her mom’s plump body too. The reverend thought his wife had the look of a red-cheeked pastry chef in some book he might have once read to the kids. Bess said, 

“Children play in the mud, Rev.”

He loved that. Rev.

She’d wanted to keep her daughter normal, Dutch guessed. “Don’t make her too special,” had been his wife’s message. Who was he to argue? Bess was an educator, a terrific teacher. She knew kids.

“I want the child to get along,” she’d say.

“Can’t she be talented and get along?”

“It depends. How talented are we talking?”

The reverend cherished these memories of his family. Pastureland Retreat was a blessing. To sit in his leather chair and look out the window at the fine snow drifting down on the meadow and think about his life—his Bess, his daughter and son—what could be better? Considering the circumstances . . . nothing, absolutely nothing. He was the youngest person at Pastureland. Fifty-seven last October, a youngster compared to the retreat’s majority of seventy- and eighty-year-olds. Then there was Mr. Vasquez—a hundred and two and still flirting with the ladies and using the treadmill every morning.

Dutch Harnell looked down at the small bandage on the backside of his wrist.

He started to pick at the adhesive. God, how many times do I need to see the thing? This was the fifth time in two days he’d peeled off the white gauze to have a look. There were some things you needed to look at and look at again. A man had to be sure some things were really, really there. This was Mage Dalton’s work, the woman who lived in the room at the end of his hallway. Seventy-six years old, still one of the greats. She’d shown him her arms, her back, the calves of her legs. Like walking through an art gallery. The old gal carried her resume with her. Dutch had not stopped examining his wrist. The area was red and swollen, but it was there. A beauty, the work of a true artist. On the reverend’s right wrist was the fresh tattoo of a heart.

---

The Doll Harvest is available for pre-order

from the following vendors:

B&N

Author

Ron Savage was a senior staff psychologist at a state mental health facility in Virginia and also had a private practice. Ron is the author of seven novels and two volumes of short stories, and has published more than 125 stories worldwide. He is the recipient of the Editor’s Circle Award in Best New Writing and was nominated for the Pushcart Prize. Ron is a member of PEN America and has also been a guest fiction editor for Crazyhorse. Some of his publications can be found in Film Comment, the North American Review, Shenandoah, the Baltimore Review, and the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction.