THE RUSH Blog Tour
I am thrilled to be hosting a spot on THE RUSH by Si Spurrier & Nathan C. Gooden Blog Tour hosted by Rockstar Book Tours. Check out my post and make sure to enter the giveaway!
About The Book:
Title: THE RUSH: This Hungry Earth Reddens Under Snowclad Hills (The Rush #1-5)
Author: Si Spurrier, Addison Duke (Colorist), Nathan C. Gooden (Illustrations), Hassan Otsmane-Elhaou (Letterer), Adrian F. Wassel (Editor)
Pub. Date: August 9, 2022
Publisher: Vault Comics
Formats: Paperback, eBook
Pages: 136
Find it: Goodreads, Amazon, Kindle, B&N, iBooks, Kobo, TBD, Bookshop.org
Historical horror that chills to the bone, The RUSH. is for fans of Dan Simmons’, The Terror mined with a Northwestern Yukon gold rush edge. Answer the call of the wild north and stampede to the Klondike…
ALL THAT GLITTERS IS NOT GOLD. ALL THAT HUNGERS IS NOT HOLY. ALL THAT LIVE ARE NOT ALIVE.
This Hungry Earth Reddens Under Snowclad Hills.
1899, Yukon Territory. A frozen frontier, bloodied and bruised by the last great Gold Rush. But in the lawless wastes to the North, something whispers in the hindbrains of men, drawing them to a blighted valley, where giant spidertracks mark the snow and impossible guns roar in the night.
To Brokehoof, where gold and blood are mined alike. Now, stumbling towards its haunted forests comes a woman gripped not by greed — but the snarling rage of a mother in search of her child…
From Si Spurrier (Way of X, Hellblazer) and Nathan C. Gooden (Barbaric, Dark One) comes THE RUSH, a dark, lyrical delve into the horror and madness of the wild Yukon.
Collects the entire series. For fans of The Terror, Fortitude, Coda, and Moonshine.
Reviews:
“The book strikes a wealthy mixed vein of sophisticated psychological chills and monstrous horror.”― Publishers Weekly
“Gritty historical drama meets supernatural horror in this sumptuously drawn tale set during the Yukon Gold Rush.” ― PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
“The Rush is a chilling bit of historical horror. Rugged and raw and thoroughly researched. It’s got such a wonderfully creepy sense of menace but most of all it’s the moving story of a mother searching for her child, that’s its beating heart. Wonderful work.” — Victor Lavalle (best-selling and award-winning author of he anthology, Slapboxing with Jesus and four novels, The Ecstatic, Big Machine, The Devil in Silver, and The Changeling, the fantasy-horror novella The Ballad of Black Tom, and the comics series Destroyer and Eve)
“The Rush is a splendidly savage tale of frontier scum and the doom they’ve brought down upon themselves, and the innocents cursed to suffer alongside them. I for one can’t wait to see more.” — Garth Ennis (best-selling and award-winning writer, Preacher, and writer/co-creator of The Boys)
What was your inspiration for writing your graphic novel?
SS: Inspiration’s a knotty old concept, I find. Most of the time it’s really just a convenience; a tulpa, a mirage, invented and honored after the fact, which can be treated as if real by the writer or artist to aid the discussion of a work. In my experience inspirations, like ideas, tend to be cumulative. Accretive. I see the early stages of a project as a nebula. A proto-galaxy, aswirl with the dust of memory, interest and observation. A cloud of gas made of mannerisms borrowed from people and places, snippets of history, misremembered anecdotes. All of it wrangled and mangled by the imperfect gravity of the mind. Ejecting the comets that don’t fit. Trimming those Procrustrean elements which are almost, but not quite, right. Until, by a process of combination, fusion and mutation, what emerges feels entirely new.
Hey presto: inspiration.
I say “most of the time” because there are moments, once in a blue moon, when a lucky and receptive mind might actually receive an informational thunderbolt, without any conscious percolation, which provides the entire groundwork for a story or project. Without those moments, I might quietly doubt the existence of anything quite as magical as Ideas at all. (Bad writer, naughty writer, back behind your curtain.) But they happen. In them we see echoes of the original meaning of the word “inspiration”: inspirare, “to breathe into”; denoting the magical moment that some spirit, deity or existential force breathed its holy pneuma into one’s mind.
It happened to me only once. A story that leaned heavily on a complicated tangle of plot and character. A time-travelling metaphysical romance crime thriller that eventually became a book called Numbercruncher – long since out of print, sorry. It struck me, fully formed, like a torpedo, while I was autopiloting my bicycle along a coastal road. With a story that leans so heavily on convolution I doubt it could have come into being any other way. Echoes here of creationist arguments – the complexity of the eye! – with their slight whiff of desperation. Even miracles turn out to be assembled in increments, if you just look closely enough.
The Rush did not arrive in a thunderbolt. It is one of the best things I’ve ever written, but I find it suits the pragmatic tone of the work to simply admit: there was no magic in its conception. Just graft and evolution. Just echoes of real hardships. The elaboration of the supernatural and the purest distillation I could imagine of the book’s driving theme: obsession. I was obsessed with this story long before I started writing it, and every tightened moment of veracity and verisimilitude I felt for it went straight into its characters’ mouths.
I’ve wanted to write a horror Western for a long time. There’s something deliciously fertile about the legend and the emotion. The ambiguity of whether this was a real time, a real place, or just a mythological notion of one. The problem, I’d felt, was that stories in that category tend to be rather utilitarian. Genre-mashing by numbers. A chimera of cowboys and creepiness, stitched together in the hopes that the result would be greater than the sum of its parts. It’s not just werewolves, guys, it’s werewolves *with revolvers*. Eh.
What I was on the lookout for, instead, was some element of frontier Victoriana which could engage elegantly with a heightened element. Be it the supernatural, the extraterrestrial, the folkloric. (Or, as it happened, an ambiguous melding of them all.) What I wanted was a marriage in which neither aspect felt awkwardly bolted onto the other. In that light, it felt wrong to rush it. Elegance often works like that, I find. As does inspiration. You can’t force either.
In as much as there was any defining inspiration behind The Rush, it arrived when I was in a charity shop last year, browsing yellowing books while my son was donating a sack of toys he’d grown out of. I found myself thumbing through a printed portfolio of photographs by one E.A.Hegg. Glorious, astonishing, epic vistas, in faded sepia and silver nitrate. Thousands of desperate men journeying, working and living in the most appalling conditions imaginable, during the last great Gold Rush of the western world.
The Yukon stampede, the Klondike panic, in the dying days of the 19th century. Dead horses rotting under snow. Men pausing at the roadside, too tired to do anything more but place gun to temple. Mounties erecting Maxim Guns on the mountain passes to stop foolhardy prospectors crossing with insufficient supplies. The ice going out on the river like a rush towards doom. The bench claims on slush-thick hills. The smokeboxes and stoves, melting soil one inch at a time.
Heady. Dreamlike images. And yet very real.
I immediately began research. Although it didn’t feel like work, really. At this point the buzz was one of pure fascination. It wasn’t until I’d absorbed dozens of astonishing tales of fortitude and monomania, until I’d begun to appreciate the scale of the frenzy which infected so many hundreds of thousands between 1897 and 1899, until I’d agitated at the motives that drove them to abandon their lives and willingly suffer unthinkable hardships on the year-long journey to the goldfields of Dawson, until I’d read about the fortunes made and squandered, about the years of disappointment facing the vast majority of the miners, until I’d fixed a clear image in mind of the near-paranatural grip with which the discovery of gold seized the souls of all the people who came and went and lived and died in the Yukon in those frenzied years, that I realized this was the seed of my new galaxy.
The mist swirled. Extraneous bodies entered the vortex. I’m a recent father, so into the mix went a new and indomitable flavor of obsession. Folkore – always my preoccupation. Real histories intruded into the fiction. Gaps were filled with logistical necessity. People I know, turns of phrase, all mercilessly filched and written into scripts. Is this inspiration? Is this the breath of a muse at work? Or just algorithms crunching? Does it matter?
What emerged was a story about a benighted mining town in the frozen north where some unspeakable taboo has been broken. Where the natural order is shattered; where lust for gold is being exploited by unnatural forces; where half-crazed men spend years digging with bleeding fingers through permafrozen earth. Where obsession is normality and monstrous things move through shadowy forests.
A story about a woman who arrives in town, immune to the frenzy. A woman with an mania far stronger and far purer. She’s come to find her son. She doesn’t give a fuck about gold.
That’s The Rush. A story where the inspiration doesn’t matter. Only the obsession.
NG: I jumped at the opportunity to work on THE RUSH. This was a project I was born to draw. I grew up watching westerns with my father. This is such a little known , under researched part of the American history, during the gold rush. I am also a big fan of Spurrier, so this was too good to be true
About Si Spurrier:
His work in the latter field stretches from award winning creator-owned books such as Numbercruncher, Six-Gun Gorilla and The Spire to projects in the U.S. mainstream like Hellblazer, The Dreaming, and X-Men. It all began with a series of twist-in-the-tail stories for the UK’s beloved 2000AD, which ignited an enduring love for genre fiction. His latest book, Coda, is being published by Boom! Studios at present.
His prose works range from the beatnik neurosis-noir of Contract to the occult whodunnit A Serpent Uncoiled via various franchise and genre-transgressing titles. In 2016 he took a foray into experimental fiction with the e-novella Unusual Concentrations: a tale of coffee, crime and overhead conversations.
He lives in Margate, regards sushi as part of the plotting process, and has the fluffiest of cats.
Website | Twitter | Instagram | Goodreads
About Nathan C. Gooden:
An award-winning illustrator and sequential artist, Nathan C. Gooden is Art Director at Vault Comics. Nathan studied animation at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, and worked in film production, before co-founding Vault Comics. Nathan’s previous works include Brandon Sanderson’s Dark One (Vault), Barbaric (Vault), Zojaqan (Vault), and Killbox (from American Gothic Press). He lives in Southern California, where he plays a lot of basketball and hikes constantly with his wife.
Website | Instagram | Goodreads
Giveaway Details:
2 winners will receive a finished copy of THE RUSH, US Only.
Ends August 23rd, midnight EST.
Tour Schedule:
Week One:
| 7/25/2022 | Writer of Wrongs | Guest Post |
| 7/26/2022 | BookHounds | Guest Post/IG Post |
| 7/27/2022 | #BRVL Book Review Virginia Lee Blog | Excerpt |
| 7/28/2022 | Two Chicks on Books | Guest Post |
| 7/29/2022 | @jaimerockstarbooktours | IG Post |
| 7/30/2022 | Bookdreamr | Review/IG Post/TikTok Post |
Week Two:
| 7/31/2022 | Sadie’s Spotlight | Guest Post/IG Post |
| 8/1/2022 | Rajiv’s Reviews | Review/IG Post |
| 8/2/2022 | The Girl Who Reads | Review/IG Post |
| 8/3/2022 | Fire and Ice | Review |
| 8/4/2022 | The Real World According To Sam | Review/IG Post |
| 8/5/2022 | @allyluvsbooksalatte | IG Post |
| 8/6/2022 | See Sadie Read | Review/IG Post |
Week Three:
| 8/7/2022 | The Momma Spot | Review/IG Post |
| 8/8/2022 | Lifestyle of Me | Review |
| 8/9/2022 | Two Points of Interest | Review |
| 8/10/2022 | The Chatty Bookworm | Tik Tok Review/IG Post |
| 8/11/2022 | One More Exclamation | Review/IG Post |
| 8/12/2022 | Nerdophiles | Review |
| 8/13/2022 | @just_another_mother_with_books | IG Review |
Week Four:
| 8/14/2022 | The Underground | Review |
| 8/15/2022 | @thebookishfoxwitch | IG Review |
| 8/16/2022 | Brandi Danielle Davis | Review/IG Post |
| 8/17/2022 | More Books Please blog | Spotlight |
| 8/18/2022 | Lady Hawkeye | Excerpt/IG Post |
| 8/19/2022 | @lexijava | Review/IG Post |
Congrats on your tour!
Sounds like a good book.
The book sounds like a great read. It certainly has the right title.
This sounds like a most unique and unusual book.
cool cover