First Chapter Reads

For this weeks episode I read from the captivating ‘Spiders Friend’ by M.C. Burnell.

You can find the book here: https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/1161802

https://amzn.to/3puz2ml

The Spider’s Friend is a thrilling, twist-filled adventure, a palace intrigue with less palace and more battling-giant-jellyfish. A must-read for anyone interested in novel second worlds, it has mole-people and a city made of waterfalls; one of the narrative characters is an ambulatory plant.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit rohanoduill.substack.com

For this weeks episode I am reading from the excellent ‘Melancholic Parables. Check out this beautiful little book by Dale Stromberg.

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Bellatrix Sakakino has lived many lives. She dampens electricity. She’s radioactive. She longs for a fruit that went extinct before she was born. She’s not above committing a massacre for the sake of a perfect omelet.

She crashes through timelines and circumstances, recurring in these flash stories as a tricksterish film director, a pink hedgehog, a simulation of herself, or a child who can only speak in dial-up modem shrieks.

Are we the same person we were last year? Or last week? Or last story? Whimsical and dolorous, ironic and absurd, this slippery assortment of stories dances around these questions with ambiguous aplomb.

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Dale Stromberg is an author, editor, and translator. He studied the art of fiction with the novelists Richard Bankowsky and Doug Rice in Sacramento before spending about a decade in Tokyo, where he fronted a few bands. Now he lives near Kuala Lumpur, an unobtrusive immigrant.

https://mybook.to/MelancholicParables

https://dalestromberg.jimdofree.com/

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit rohanoduill.substack.com

This week I am reading from the excellent Cascade by Rachel A Rosen.

RACHEL A. ROSEN lives and makes trouble in Tkaronto (Toronto) in the country currently known as Canada. A genre strumpet with an outlook darker than VantaBlack, she straddles urban fantasy, cosmic horror, dystopian futures, and eco-fiction. Her stone-cold bummer of a first novel, Cascade (The Sleep of Reason Book 1), was published by The BumblePuppy Press in 2022, and with Zilla Novikov, she’s the co-author of The Sad Bastard Cookbook: Food You Can Make So You Don’t Die. When she’s not hammering out the next book in the Sleep of Reason series, you can find her either under one of several cats, designing book covers, or indoctrinating the youth in hopes of getting them to come to class every now and again.

You can buy it on Amazon, the BumblePuppy Press, Beyond Cataclysm if you're in the UK, or order it from your local bookshop.

https://mybook.to/cascade

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit rohanoduill.substack.com

Hello and welcome to episode 1 of First Chapter Reads, where each week I will read the first chapter of a book(with the authors permission of course)

For the first week I read from my own book ‘Cold Rising’ and I also broke the rules and read the prologue instead of the first chapter, but I explain why.

If anyone would like me to read the first chapter of their book please do get in touch with me, you can find me on Substack, Twitter or through the lowerdecks.com website

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit rohanoduill.substack.com

Audio version of the short story "Marriage Clause" by H. L. Hinkle, first published in Into the Unknown: A Science Fiction Anthology by Lower Decks Press.

Voice: Briana Bedore
Audio engineer: Brooks Bedore

Explore this and other stories in the full anthology: https://www.lowerdeckspress.com/books-multiformat/into-the-unknown

Image courtesy of Zack Walker via Unsplash.com.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit rohanoduill.substack.com