Below is an edited version of the pitch I wrote up for the new series. I’ve cut out some commercially sensitive stuff, some in house chatter, some industry BS. What’s left is a pretty good outline of what I’ll be writing next. It’s also a good template for how to pitch a book idea (although you need to bear in mind I have excised all of the marketing content).
Meet Dave Hooper. Marine engineer, oilrig fire boss, single dad, drinker, fighter. A man who has selfishly squandered great intellectual gifts and the luck of his Irish grandmother on dissipation and boorishness. A loveable asshole, but really, an asshole. The Jimmy McNulty of the small, clubbish world of oilrig disaster response.
Hooper is the sort of guy who fights fiercely to be with his children, but inevitably lets everyone down when he’s allowed anywhere near them. The things that make him great at one of the most dangerous jobs in the world – physical courage bordering on recklessness, a pigheaded refusal to accept the odds when they’re stacked against him, a lack of respect for any authority which hasn’t earned it, directly, on the fire line with him – all make Dave Hooper ill suited to decent company and parenthood.
We find him, at the start of his saga, experiencing a moment of clarity about the mess he has made of his life and the lives of everyone who ever loved him. Divorce papers await his signature back in small, stale-smelling room he has moved into on the Deep Horizon drill rig. Even his own lawyer, who he hasn’t paid, is telling him to sign them and give up. He’s beaten. His soon to be ex-wife loves him, really she does, but she just can’t be with him any more and nor can their two boys, she insists. David Hooper is a bad influence.
Suffering from a hangover and struggling to recall the details of the two hookers he left asleep in a hotel room paid for BP back onshore, Hooper can only agree. For the sake of his sons he has decided not to fight, for the first time in his life. He’ll sign the papers, say goodbye to his boys and let them go. It would be best for all, even though his wife plans to take them back to Nantucket.
And then, at his lowest ebb, the world as he knew it passes into history.
The Deep Horizon drill bit punches down through a capstone hidden tens of thousands of feet below the surface of the Gulf of Mexico. It cracks open the seal between the world of men and the Under-Realms, allowing monsters back into the light.
At first it seems an everyday emergency. A shattered drill bit, a splintered drive shaft, an explosion, a fire. A day at the office for Dave Hooper. So much easier than dealing with women and their needs and feelings and their demands and their lawyers and the expectations and frustrations and the never-ending fucking migraine of coping with the hell of other people…
And then suddenly it’s not normal because two of his guys are screaming. They’re not burned. They haven’t been caught in a blow out or a secondary explosion. Something is… eating them. Something covered in crude oil and looking just like one of those things in that Lord of the Rings movie he took the boys to. The one that gave them nightmares for a week. This thing… orcs they were called in the movie… this thing has ripped the arm right off of Marty Grback, and Marty Grback has some pretty big fucking arms.
Dave Hooper doesn’t think. He acts. He charges the… thing, the orc, whatever it is, swinging his axe and splitting its skull with the first mighty blow. With a second, short and brutal strike he all but takes off the head, a nobbled, snarling animalistic skull that is all fangs and giant suppurating warts. And when he does that something happens.
He feels the life of the creature leaving it and some of that malign force seems to stay with him. As though he has leeched a small portion of its strength by the act of taking its life.
The creature, a demon, soon named an ‘orc’ by the mass media, is the vanguard of an old evil come back into our lives. The monsters of our legends were not just legends. They once walked the Earth were cast down by an older God who feared they might imperil his chosen kind. They live on in our myths and stories of the major demon archetypes, of vampires, werewolves, ghosts and demons. Of dragons and orcs and zombies and souleaters. All cultures have their own tales of them because all cultures share a common, long forgotten human history, a history of our near extinction at their hands.
When the Deep Horizon punches through the barrier between our world and their prison it releases our deepest fears in material form.
Has mankind grown strong enough to fight back? Can our magic, our technology and discipline and armies match the massed hordes of the Under Realms?
The story of dark magic and its monsters coming back into the world will mostly be the story of Dave Hooper, a flawed hero, an everyman champion who was there at the birth of the new, dark age and comes to lead the human resistance and fightback. A man who has greatness thrust upon him, he becomes our champion simply by being the first man to kill one of the Accursed. He did indeed steal some of its life essence and strength, and although he does not know it, the weapon he used, the humble fireman’s axe was likewise imbued. It is a strength that will grow with every enemy he takes down.
At first however Hooper is most concerned with saving his men, and then the rig, and then as the world falls apart, with his kids.
Magic is back, and it’s bad news for mankind. While our technology is more than a match for the power of the Under Realms – a dragon is easy meat for a Stinger missile – the hyper-complex, fragile nature of the modern human societies that make things like Stinger missiles and Apache helicopters will see them collapse when cities can no longer sustain themselves in the face of primal panic.
Importantly, although this book has obvious fantasy appeal, it is actually the technology and military elements that I want to emphasize. In the end, although Hooper is crucial, he cannot win on his own. Humanity must rescue itself and the tools we will use to do so are the weapons and the cultures we have crafted over the millennia during which we’ve been free to develop. For thousands of years our brutal, Hobbesian natures were the sorrow of the human condition. Now our hunger for war, our madness for weapons, will be the saving of us.
That, and a man called Dave.
I sooo hope we get a chance to cap the BLONDE wench who is the ice queen in NARNIA!..fk yes!
Cap her?? I want to make sweet love to her. Over and over again. From multiple vantage points.
Please don’t tell my wife. She won’t understand and it won’t go well for me.
Wasn’t she also some kind of Ice wench-queen in the movie of Pratchett’s Hogfather?
Armies of Darkness V the Army of GOD..or HAVOCK, no match really, will cap the fkrs all day everyday everywhere!. SO I should be THE lead
Better not have any fkn elves or wizards. That’d be crossing the Kiwi Hobbit Smugness line. Not really that into the fantasy stuff. I always thought that a good machine gun with grenade launcher would sort out spell casters, sword wielders, elves, orcs and those annoying fucking hobbits. Cap ‘em all, but first steal their souvenir D&D tea sets and ebay them to role players.
Be interesting to see how an orc stands up to an AK47 going at full tilt. Lots of green goo on the ground I’m hoping.
Sounds like these little suckers will be worth waiting for!
P.S. Dave sounds just like my kinda bloke – you know the ones who aren’t up themselves to start with!!
AK 47. When you absolutely positively have to killing every motherfucking orc in the room.
This is kinda like playing HERATIC
HERETIC… and H2, by RAVEN…fkn AWESOME!..back in 1994..lol..fkn long time ago!
JB – given that its 3 books and that civilisation is on its last legs I reckon the old AK could stand the test of retro technology. Aside from that there’s so many of the fkn things lying around that it would become the prime anti-monster weapon. Just need to make sure you get some of those guys on board from Pakistan who make the ammo. In fact Pakistan would be a great place to arm yourself and grab some fighters who are used to hiding from enemies. They could blow up the Creature From The Black Lagoon with IED’s.
It would absolutely fkn rip if Godzirra makes an appearance.
Just cut out the flab mate – angels is too bloody fat – you let some rubbish go by there ..
Hmmm D&D – modern weapons mixup….my mates and I did that very thing way back when I were a spotty teenage geek. One scenario involved orcs vs a team of WW2 Germans and it don’t go well for the orcs. Another had yours truly playing a Vietnam era American SF soldier who was transplanted into a D&D world. There were advantages such as weapons power, accuracy and range, and disadvantages such as little armour protection and no idea of magic. It was fun, at least until the whole party (my character and my mates’ fantasy based characters) died horribly at the hands of some powerful demons or some such. I can go into more geeky details but won’t because typing on an iPad shits me.
Always good to work in some Judeo-Christian references for maximum resonance and impact (think Raiders of the Lost Ark). I suggest some judicious quoting of Revelation 9…
“All this has happened before. And it will happen again” also strikes me as a phrase you could use ;)
@Timmo she also played the Arch Angel Gabrielle in “Constantine”.
Speaking of which, if there’s infernal nasties, then I presume their opposite numbers will also be making an appearance? I do love alien and inscrutable faeries and angels.
No good beasties please. If humanity can’t stand on it’s own it doesn’t deserve to survive. Nukes lots of tactical nukes. Won’t be used until after some of the green voting districts have been eaten.
Can’t wait to see someone like Hanson-Young saying to an orc “we need to sit down and have a dialog*crunch* choke hack spit!
Peterb, sorry, less character devel, more splodey. Noted.
Sibeen sounds like a good name for the leader of the underworld.
*just saying*
I’m cool with splodey, just want more tinsion before and after splopey – enough of days of our lives please – and I’m not ok with Cruise playing Reacher either. Child gets a letter here.
I think everything I’ve read anything of JB’s I have liked, so it should make an interesting yarn.
But.
It would make a Fkn Epic game.
1st person shooter: hunting Orc, Zed, & other Anthropoforms.
(With no vested authority I hereby decree plural Orc = Orc, like sheep & fish.)
Sandbox potential -wander a scorched & infested earthscape, gathering survivors, battling the horde.
Flight Sim: F15 dog-fighting flocks of small, slower but more manuverable dragons.
Big Picture strategy: can you bottle ‘em back up?
Even stupid MMRPGs for spotty yoofs.
Sounds awesome. Really hoping we get some Apache action. My fave bit of milpwn kit.
Sounds pretty cool, like Doom but on an oil rig instead of Mars. Then you throw in some dragons and orcs and stuff and you get a mash up techno-thriller fantasy book with a geopolitical span like World War Z.
You know, some of these creatures are probably smart enough to figure out technology.
Thus, an Ork with an AK might be pretty nasty. At least that is what the folks at Warhammer 40K think.
Respects,
Murph
On the Outer Marches
hmmm
have you read ‘pantheocide’ some similarities- but that was all god-bothery based
if a creature is killed the item doing the killing gains power,,, me likey.
how long before someone works out that you need to collect up the bullet pieces and recast em?
or you could put loads of pieces on the front of a curved block of c4—
claymore +1 anyone?
If Lovecraft wrote “The Hellfighters”. Mix in some Clancy and Cthulhu gets his comeuppance. Might be worth a read, or better a script treatment. Sci-fi Channel is running this kind of thing currently. I hope you make the sale!
The Warded Oz? Magic Men at Work? Careful not to step on Brett’s toes while mucking about with underworld magic.
FINALLY! A book about ‘middle earth’ that I can get into. Frak’em all, JB. Any chance we can take a few hobbits out too?
Any chance of some epic sea monster? Something that requires the REALLY heavy artillery would be pretty fun :D Otherwise it sounds like your enemies will be all infantry-types.
Bin done. Checkout Monster Hunters International by Larry Corriea
http://www.amazon.com/Monster-Hunter-International-Larry-Correia/dp/1439132852
Actually, try reading anything by Larry Corriea – he has some interesting ideas on how psychic powers could work.
Also,
This thing… orcs they were called in the movie… this thing has ripped the arm right off of Marty Grback, and Marty Grback has some pretty big fucking arms.
It’s almost impossible to pull a man’s arm off, without leverage, no matter how strong you are. All you’ll end up doing is pulling the man off his feet and towards you. Unless, as well as being incredibly strong, you’re also incredibly fast – which might make your orcs just a little too tough for anyone to handle even with a magic axe. It’s the little details…..
(I know, I know – everyone’s a freaking critic……)
Looking forward to this coming out. Right up my street. If you ever want a proof-reader………..
Cheers
Birmo, I think you are perhaps this generation’s equivalent to, Irwin Allen. To me, that’s high praise. Seriously.
A pocket universe triangulated under the waters between australia, new zealand, and australia… “they were placed at the end of the earth in a pact with ————-. it’s time for the earth to end” – trickster … the oldest god
hero = former college football player and heisman winner from the uni of okla
im covered with cats
football player from American samoa degree in petroleum engineering ou has one of the best in the world
pocket universe immune to plate tectonics
Legless, Marty had been keeping the railing between them … guess that didn’t work out so well for Marty.
Bangar – yup, that would do it.
President Obama got rather shirty about leaking some oil into the Gulf. Can you imagine what he would say about orcs and stuff? “My fellow Americans, I just want to make it clear that BP will be paying for all the damage caused by the dragons and vampires they have irresponsibly unleashed…”
Actually, I like Jane’s ideas. And I might just steal Guy’s too.
Parker and Stone might sue
There’s a couple of different types of dramatic tension you can write into a book.
Dramatic Tension 1: Technical
The orcs are invading. The problem is, we don’t know how to technically wipe them out because … (pick one) there are too many of them / we can’t locate where they’re from / they have this hard chitinous armour.
Dramatic Tension 2: Moral
The orcs are invading. The problem is, we can’t kill the orcs because that would make us morally culpable, because … (pick one) killing the orc leader kills the heroine / the orcs are actually ordinary people under mind control / we have not yet explored the cultural diversity of their organically grown yoghurt.
The thing with orcs is, there’s no moral tension. They’re completely evil. And they live underground where there are no civillians, so we can set off nukes without worrying about collateral damage. And as soon as we read about the orc eating Marty Grback’s big fucking arms, us readers are like “Sod them”, and would start lobbying our local MP to release the hounds. So we need technical tension.
But then, why can’t we just drop a nuke on the underworld at the end of the first act and be done with it?
Unless … the plot is actually like this:
http://xkcd.com/734/
A place, a mother that gave birth to warriors, both male and female, people that endure was needed to surround the portal. The Trickster chose the end of the earth to those in the oldest lands, a place undiscovered by most, the South Pacific. His eye fell upon the Maories, Samoans, Pacific Islanders and the original Australians as the ones to cast spells, hold caution, but be ferocious should the idea clash with the ideas of others. unedited
You can put a Texan as a sidekick on the rig. The University of Oklahoma and the University of Texas football fans hate each other. If you used this angle, you could use the n-word. “This isn’t even a tan compared to the luscious ladies of summer break.” it adds controversy with the opportunity to do the right thing.
us lost 10 Samoans in the recent wars, and two returned with medals We have a plethora of samoans on pro football and university teams true story – there’s a high school on american samoa that specializes in making football players and the armed forces are the number one employers in american samoa
Nice. And I’m writing about a serial killer? Pfft, some guys get all the fun.
I can see your movie opening now: a kid in pyjamas playing around in his backyard, on the skirts of a town, north-east America. Green rolling hills stretching out beyond the back fence. Sun shining birds chirping all that. He’s got a Gandalf figurine duking it out with Buzz Lightyear while being chased from a t-rex ‘You shall not pass!’ versus ‘To infinity and beyond’ and ‘Rarr!’ etc… then, an almighty rumbling splits the stillness. Labrador sniffs the air and crawls into his kennel, hunkered down with paws over his nose. Kid stands, peers up at them hills. A stampede? It’s huge… Buffalo? Nope. Orcs. Awesome. Kid runs inside, where mum and dad are having breakfast. ‘Come see the orcs!’ ‘Not now Jimmy.’ ‘But dad!’ ‘I said not -’ Dad stops. The dining table vibrates. Looks over his paper, out the glass doors of the patio. WTF? He goes out on the deck. ‘Martha… get my shotgun.’ ‘What?’ He puts on his glasses. ‘Get my… holy shi-’ The hills erupt. That first swarm was a point company. Now there’s a few divisions of the fuckers rolling forth, like someone kicked open a fireant colony. We pan up and above the house, looking down at the town, wider still to reveal the outskirts of a bigger city – it’s like a wave of crude oil is about to wash over it…
BOOM. Title sequence, then:
‘DAVE, two weeks earlier.’ Think Bruce Willis from Armageddon but taller, rangier, less of a pussy. Sittin’ naked in his filthy little room sharpening his axe. Well seasoned hickory handle, gleaming 8 pound head, not what you’d pick up from Walmart – this thing’s a fucking heirloom. Dave’s eyeing his wedding band on the desk. The tan-line of it on his finger shows takin’ it off was no small feat. ‘Fuck the ring.’ Takes a swing at it – tries to slice it in half but he’s still drunk, hits the floor in a daze. Took out the desk though, and with it the divorce papers. Puts the ring back on. Picks up a bent smoke. Goes outside. Lights up. Bright morning sun, middle of the fucking ocean. Takes a leak off the side of the steel walkway jutting out off the oilrig – and right into the last skiff returning from the Havana whore-run. Right onto his boss. Dave, butt naked, smoking, gives them a thumbs up, scratches his arse and sighs. ‘One-a-them days huh…’
All right then, I’ll let you write it. Back to my boring arse stupid serial killer bullshit…
Mind you don’t duplicate “Sanctuary,” Birmingham.
jp – don’t stop now!
John Ringo has played a little in this patch although his demons turned out to be aliens in the Looking Glass series of books:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Into_the_Looking_Glass
Well worth reading…
So back to why we can’t just nuke the orcs and be done with it…
Everything, both living and undead, needs to eat. It’s just that the underworld eats souls. And what is oil but a sludge of trillions of souls of our long-dead ancestors?
That’s why the demons flock to the huge reservoirs of oil beneath the ground. And that’s why orcs can come to the surface via a stream of oil pulled up through the earth by Dave’s rig.
And it’s also why a 21st century military, with all the firepower in the world, can’t just nuke the orcs. You have to use older weapons that don’t rely on gunpowder. Axes. Swords. Electric egg-beaters.
The problem is, it takes a while for the world to work this out. All we know is that orcs start to appear wherever there is oil. And so in the mass panic that ensues, nobody wants to go near a petrol station. And the world economy grinds to a halt.
But that’s just the first act.
Oil becomes much less valuable. And other energy sources much more so. Australia, Canada and Kazakhstan, who collectively supply 63% of the world’s supply of uranium, become vast treasure houses. People notice that Australia is only guarded by a few dodgy Collins class submarines (currently at the mechanic, waiting for parts that won’t arrive). Kazakhstan, governed by a tyrant, becomes an economic superpower for the first time since the days of the Silk Road. And then they are promptly invaded by Russia.
Think I’m gonna give up and just have the publishers commission you lot.
huh. JB does Orcs. Derp.
well, a second gold-plated volvo would probably look OK in the garage……
Orc Horde versus an entrenched firebase with squad-support weapons, mortars…not much contest.
Orc horde plus a decent mage/illusionist versus above unit, not so much.
Thing about magic, its not limited by physics, more by the imagination.
Just say some tricksy Imp alongside said Horde could render the Orcs invisible/silent.
Maybe it could make double base propellant fail to function.
Or, (to follow in Tolkein’s and Lovecraft’s footsteps a little further) what if they could directly affect the minds of those defending Humanity?
I’m picturing grunts seeing their brothers in arms turn into dire monsters before their eyes and pulling the trigger on their own side.
Fighter pilots somehow fogetting to keep an eye on the fuel gagues, or even the artificial horizon.
Four-Star generals twisted by Dark Powers to make the worst of decisions, putting all they seek to protect in even greater peril.
Definitely a large canvass you could apply your talent to!
just.. please… don’t end up writing some WoW/WH40k- hack Fanfiction – there is enough of that out there already.
I also quite like the idea of traditional lore and witchcraft gaining new power with the opening of this prison. Abovementioned magical Imp dies an agonising and horrific death from the curse set upon him by the last breath of a dying tribal Papuan shaman…..
If you choose to rationalise/justify such a device, you might consider a unifying element to traditional/superstitious/religious practice: faith and belief.
Such that, a genuine prayer from a true believer of any religion, or a heinous hex from a devout voodoopractitioner… might even work!
Linking this invasion of ancient evil to a subterranean world of petroleum deposits could go a long way toward pushing the modern world to the brink: If every active oil well became a separate source of nasty gremlins… I would think
A) the mid-east be even more FKD than normal
B) the price of a barrel of crude might hit negative territory (“we’ll pay you to take it away and burn it!”)
Maybe the supply-chain petroleum companies and their workers could be the undercover vanguard of the invasion. I always thought those console-operators and petrol tanker truckies were THE DEVIL…….!
Lots of cool things you could do.
Hope the publishers bite.
PS i Love the idea of a Fire-Axe of Destroy Evil. love it.
Damn your eyes Durand. you type faster than me it seems ;P
Im unsure of the petroleum link to gunpowder/modern propellant, but the USN would certainly need to ramp up its use of algae-sourced biofuel to keep chasing Krakens around the sea-lanes with nuclear depth-charges!
Joe, I was thinking that you can’t shoot guns on an oil rig, lest it all catches fire.
But I like the idea of separate oil fields having separate numbers of demons. It would mean that the price of oil actually rises. Whoever is left with the last working wells gets to be rich.
Thomas Friedman of the New York Times regularly points out that the higher the price of oil,the more “assertive” the oil dictators get, and the more terrorism gets sponsored etc
But let’s say the price has crashed. Imagine this, from somewhere deep inside the bowels of the Sydney Convention Centre.
“… and so I say to you, the shareholders, you think the orcs are bad? No. They are a miracle. They will save Blackwood Oil, and make us all rich.
The biggest problem oil companies like us face is finding the oil in the first place. Despite our technology, we really don’t know where to look. So we spend millions of your dollars drilling dry holes in the ground, hoping, praying, that we’ll find something that pays the bills.
But now we’ve discovered orcs, who can smell an oil field through three miles of rock. All we have to do is capture some, get them to tell us where the oil is, and every dollar you invest will be returned a hundredfold.
And remember, they’re orcs. So they’re evil. So we can use all methods available to persuade them. And it’ll be, you know, moral.
Ladies and gentlemen, there’s a race on to capture the first orcs, to lay the first claim to the undiscovered oil fields around the world. So why invest with us? Because out of all the armies in all the world, only Blackwood employees have defeated orcs in combat. In short, we have a secret weapon…”
***
Meanwhile, the secret weapon was sleeping off a hangover …