Hello!
Welcome to my first ever newsletter for those of you who have subscribed. Go easy on me, I’m sure I’ll get better at this as time goes on.
Just to reassure you, I don’t plan on bombarding you all the time. This missive will mainly be for book news and exclusive little bonus things like extra chapters, deleted scenes and short stories. So hope you enjoy, and I promise I won’t defenestrate myself if you want to unsubscribe.
THE DROP IS OUT NOW!
Last week saw the UK release of my fourth novel, THE DROP, a suspense story in which four old friends get stuck at the top of a roller coaster in the middle of the desert, and it soon becomes clear that their only way out is to confess all their worst secrets to one another before the sun rises and does them all some serious damage.
One early reviewer described it as RollerCoaster Tycoon meets Saltburn, which I quite liked. Despite the book having some horror elements, it’s very much a psychological suspense thriller like my other three novels. The initial spark for the story came while stuck inside during the pandemic. I found myself longingly watching YouTube videos of roller coaster enthusiasts visiting their favourite amusement parks, and the idea for the book just started growing in my mind.
People getting stuck in unusual places was always a favourite story device going right back to my youth (King’s The Mist and Koontz’s Trapped come to mind). One of the first novels I tried to write when I was a teenager involved a maths class leaving their lesson after the teacher doesn’t arrive, only to find everyone else has vanished. Worse—they are imprisoned by a strange forcefield on the otherwise abandoned school site! Hang on, sounds sort of interesting now I’ve written it down; maybe I should revisit this…
Once I had the initial idea for THE DROP, I knew the story had to be set somewhere isolated, and where there was very little chance of being saved by a passer-by. During my initial research, I learned all about the “Coaster Wars”, and how for a time theme parks battled with one another to have the tallest roller coaster at their park (check this video out for more). Roller coaster designers initially moved away from height as a selling point, but a soon-to-open theme park in Saudi Arabia claims to have built the world’s biggest coaster which dwarfs the current one by some way. That got me thinking about other megaprojects in the Gulf-region, like The Line and The Palm Islands, and pretty soon I knew exactly where I was going to build my coaster, Hysteria.
Much of the story revolves around the characters coming to terms with their shared adventures and mishaps at an elite university. Some of that is drawn from my own experiences as a very wide-eyed comprehensive kid at Cambridge, and the feeling of being a bit of an outsider. The college in the book is fictional, and it’s a composite of a number of real ones.
I really hope you like the book. It’s available at all the usual shops, and if you find yourself enjoying, please consider leaving a review. The more words the better too, as lots of sites are now using these bizarre AI summaries, which scrape review text to give an overview.
You can buy in the following places:
And if you’re interested in hearing me talk about THE DROP and high-concept thrillers, I was on CRIME TIME FM this week with Holly Seddon, Victoria Selman, and Steve Cavanagh. You can hear the chat here, and it was really good fun. (I actually really like THE GREY (which we discuss) and the cliffhanger ending). I remember first being recommended it by my Dad, who handed his phone to make me watch it there and then. I obliged, and the film started with a very realistic plane crash, which was a bit of a shock as at that moment we were cruising at around 40,000 feet ourselves.
Some random THE DROP trivia:
As part of my research, I spoke with some brilliant roller coaster and amusement park experts, including Coaster Bot (see video above), and the chap who designed Nemesis at Alton Towers. I also learned a theme park is specifically a park with a theme (like Ferrari World or the old American Adventure), and anything else is actually an amusement park
This is my second stab at a university book. The first one I wrote during the pandemic and is sort of The Drop’s twin. It’s a lot of fun, and I hope one day it gets to see the light of day. For now it sits in my digital trunk of mysterious unpublished things…
One early reader of The Drop gave it a lovely review, but didn’t believe that a group of people could be heard yelling from 200m/650 feet up in the air. I do a lot of research when writing, and this was one of the many things I had to work out. So if you’re curious, check out this video of some chaps trying to chuck a basketball into a hoop from 200m and have a listen to the reactions
ALAN PARTRIDGE FACT, TO BE DELIVERED IN THE VOICE: I usually write my books at my desk in my garden office. But it can be a bit gloomy in there, so to get that deserty-outside vibe, I found myself gravitating towards a chair by our spare room’s big window
That’s me done, and I hope you get a chance to read THE DROP. And if you’re interested in getting your copy signed, drop me a line and we can work something out.
See you next time,
Simon
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