Sawbones
A road trip from hell...
The papers call him Sawbones: a serial killer touring America, kidnapping young women. The FBI are trying to catch him - but they're getting nowhere. The latest victim is Laura Jones: 16, blonde, pretty..... and the daughter of one of New York's biggest gangsters.
Laura's dad wants revenge - and he knows just the guys to get it.
This time Sawbones has picked on the wrong family. .
Corrupting the youth of today. Or at least, that's the line the Sunday Times took when they discovered some silly sod at Waterstone's had cocked up while compiling the company's catalogue last year and included Sawbones in the children's section.
To be fair, it's easy to see why the mistake happened - it's part of Barrington Stoke's 'Most Wanted' series. Barrington Stoke normally publish children's books, to quote their site: "When struggling readers are hooked on a story, their reading ability actually improves, building their confidence to tackle the next book, and the next. Struggling, reluctant and dyslexic readers deserve the best books available." 'Most Wanted' is their relatively new line aimed at adult reluctant readers.
The idea was to get established writers to come up with proper adult-themed books, but written to be accessible to anyone with a reading age of eight or up (hence the confusion in the Waterstone's catalogue). This is why Sawbones is a novella, rather than a novel - traditionally these stories aren't meant to be any longer than 15,000 words long, as anything bigger than that can really put reluctant readers off. So at a meaty 18,500 words Sawbones is very much at the top limit.
Sadly that doesn't seem to have been much consolation to the people who bought the book on Amazon.co.uk, thinking they were getting a full-sized novel, and left one star reviews saying I was ripping people off by selling this as a book. As if I actually had any say in how much the book cost, or how it was being sold. Which, surprisingly enough, I don't. I eventually managed to get Amazon to change its product description to stress that it was a novella, short, designed to be accessible for reluctant readers, and didn't feature Aberdeen, but I see from visiting the site recently that it's back to he way it was, and more shitty reviews moaning about the book's length are being posted.
See, this is what happens when you try to do something nice.
That said, this is one of my favourite things I've ever written. I'm actually surprisingly happy with it, especially given the constraints and guidelines I had to follow.
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