Michael Logan

Novelist, Journalist and other things ending in -ist

Free novel

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With only a week to go until the International Thriller Writers 2015 awards are announced, I’m giving away free kindle editions of Wannabes, which is on the shortlist for the best ebook original, until Wednesday, July 8.

You can download it from the UK and US Amazon stores free of charge until then.

It has a 4.56 rating on Goodreads and blah, blah, blah. The blurb follows:

From the winner of the inaugural Terry Pratchett First Novel Prize comes a new satire, which has been shortlisted for the International Thriller Writers Best E-Book Original Novel 2015 Award.

Celebrities are mobbing London’s laser clinics as a deranged wannabe bumps off A-listers, believing he can absorb their powers and become famous by taping their tattoos to his body.

Washed-up pop star Jackie Thunder isn’t joining the stampede. Jackie figures that if he can get on the killer’s hit list, without the inconvenience of actually being murdered, he’ll gain the publicity needed to reignite his career.

But there’s more at stake than Jackie can possibly imagine. Guiding the killer is Murmur, a minor demon with his own agenda to make a name for himself, and Jackie becomes an unwitting pawn in a decades-old plot to destroy great music through murder, mayhem and manipulation.

With humanity’s collective soul at stake, how far will Jackie go to reach the top?

Buy Apocalypse Cow, get Wannabes free

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From now until the end of August 2014, I will be running a promotion to get two of my books for the price of one. Buy a copy of Apocalypse Cow in any format during this period, and you will receive a free ebook of my new novel, Wannabes.

To claim your ebook, send proof of purchase to freelancelogan@fastmail.co.uk, and I will email you a download code for your free book.

Apocalypse Cow

‘Apocalypse Cow treads that rare path between horrific and hilarious, which makes for a very fun read indeed. Give it a go.’ – NY Times bestselling author Christopher Moore, author of Lamb, Fool and A Dirty Job.

Apocalypse Cow made me snort with laughter.’ – Terry Pratchett, bestselling author of the Discworld series

‘This clever and very funny twist on the traditional zombie novel is exceedingly well executed (it approaches but never quite steps into parody territory), and it ends with a scene that pretty much demands a sequel. Great stuff for horror and fantasy fans.’ – Booklist (Starred Review)

Winner of the Terry Pratchett First Novel Prize.

If you think you’ve seen it all – WORLD WAR Z, THE WALKING DEAD – you haven’t seen anything like this. From the twisted brain of Michael Logan comes Apocalypse Cow, a story about three unlikely heroes who must save Britain . . . from a rampaging horde of ZOMBIE COWS!

Forget the cud. They want blood.

It began with a cow that just wouldn’t die. It would become an epidemic that transformed Britain’s livestock into sneezing, slavering, flesh-craving four-legged zombies.

And if that wasn’t bad enough, the fate of the nation seems to rest on the shoulders of three unlikely heroes: an abattoir worker whose love life is non-existent thanks to the stench of death that clings to him, a teenage vegan with eczema and a weird crush on his maths teacher, and an inept journalist who wouldn’t recognize a scoop if she tripped over one.

As the nation descends into chaos, can they pool their resources, unlock a cure, and save the world?

Three losers.
Overwhelming odds.
One outcome . . .

Yup, we’re screwed.

Wannabes

‘Logan … blends the bitingly satirical with the delightfully nonsensical with ease, creating a wonderfully entertaining mix. Hidden beneath all the dark comedy, Logan deftly picks apart the nature of celebrity culture.’ – The Eloquent Page

‘This is a writer with a certifiable imagination capable of weaving fact into fiction with deft strokes of dark genius smattered with sniggeringly wry humour; a plot so deliciously embellished with cringeworthy terror-filled reality that you can’t help feel empathy for the whole of humanity itself, whilst choking on your tittering.’ – John Hudspith, Author of Kimi’s Secret

Celebrities are mobbing London’s laser clinics as a deranged wannabe bumps off A-listers, believing he can absorb their powers and become famous by taping their tattoos to his body.

Washed-up pop star Jackie Thunder isn’t joining the stampede. Jackie figures that if he can get on the killer’s hit list, without the inconvenience of actually being murdered, he’ll gain the publicity needed to reignite his career.

But there’s more at stake than Jackie can possibly imagine. Guiding the killer is Murmur, a minor demon with his own agenda to make a name for himself, and Jackie becomes an unwitting pawn in a decades-old plot to destroy great music through murder, mayhem and manipulation.

With humanity’s collective soul at stake, how far will Jackie go to reach the top?

Wannabes is now on sale

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My second novel, Wannabes, is now available to buy as an ebook. To celebrate, I’m giving away twenty copies. In order to enter the random draw, please spread the news on your blog, Twitter or Facebook and send me an email at freelancelogan@fastmail.co.ukto let me know you have done so. I’ll draw the winners on July 28 and send a code for the free download.
The book (and sample chapters) is currently available on Amazon UK and US, as well as all the other country stores, and through iBooks. It is also available in all ebook formats through Smashwords. The price is $3 or the currency equivalent. You can get it for the Nook from Barnes and Noble and will soon be on sale through Kobo and other ebook stores.
If you are on Goodreads, you can add the book here.
Also, don’t forget that the release date for Apocalypse Cow: World War Moo has been set as 9 June 2015. Put it in your calendar!

Wannabes
Celebrities are mobbing London’s laser clinics as a deranged wannabe bumps off A-listers, believing he can absorb their powers and become famous by taping their tattoos to his body.
Washed-up pop star Jackie Thunder isn’t joining the stampede. Jackie figures that if he can get on the killer’s hit list, without the inconvenience of being murdered, he’ll gain the publicity needed to reignite his career.
But there’s more at stake than Jackie can possibly imagine. His desperate ploy for attention plunges him into the heart of a decades-old demonic plot to destroy great music through murder, mayhem and manipulation.
With humanity’s collective soul at stake, how far will Jackie go to reach the top?

Apocalypse Cow, dead children and John Gummer

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I must be showing my age – and not just in the grey hairs, slowing legs that lead me to clog a few more people on the football field and inability to remember the location of my phone and keys for more than five seconds.
I’ve noticed quite a few reviewers of Apocalypse Cow were disturbed by one particular scene, in which the young child of a politician is killed live on television during a publicity stunt aimed at keeping consumers eating meat as the zombie virus spreads through Britain’s livestock. While it may seem gratuitous to readers who are not as advanced in years as I am, it is there for a very specific reason, one which stretches back to the height of the Mad Cow crisis in the UK.
In 1990, as Brits got themselves into a tizzy over the likelihood of contracting BSE (in its human form CJD) from eating infected beef, John Selwyn Gummer, at the time Agriculture Minister for the Tory government, staged a press event during which he tried to feed his four-year-old daughter Cordelia a burger. Only days before a cat had died of a BSE-like disease, showing that the virus could mutate, and the government had banned humans from eating beef offal.
His intention was to ease public fears over British beef. Instead, he ended up being vilified for his PR stunt, although he continued to defend his actions years later and his daughter did not contract CJD. In retrospect, the chances of her contracting any illness were very slim, and to be fair he did eat the burger himself, but he essentially took a chance with her daughter’s welfare in the hope of gaining political capital. Children have long been tools in the political game, wheeled out regularly to fluff up a politician’s family credentials and gain votes, but that was taking it a bit too far. Gummer got away with it. The politician in my book doesn’t.
Anyway, this is the problem with satire. If readers don’t actually know of the event you are parodying – and that is obviously a danger if you are drawing on something that happened 22 years ago – then they are going to miss the whole point of the scene and, as appears to be the case with my book, suspect the author is just a sadistic swine who enjoys bumping off children on page.
Of course, The Hunger Games is full of children being slaughtered in various nasty ways, and most people are fine with that because they understand there is some message behind it. Perhaps I should go down the Monty Python route in future, and flash a large ‘SATIRE’ sign across the page with a footnote explaining what I’m doing. Or maybe not.
I have also half-written a blog post on depictions of graphic violence in the media, books and films, as it has been something I have thinking about a lot given both the nature of my book and long history of working in journalism dealing with rather nasty conflicts. I need to chew on it a bit longer, but will post it soon. The basic gist of it is looking at why we don’t like to see pictures of dead bodies, and why people are offended by descriptions of death in novels – even though novelists explore and describe everything else in great detail.

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