Friday, October 12, 2012

Writer's Block: Barry Graham

Posted By on Fri, Oct 12, 2012 at 9:00 AM

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  • Daishin Stephenson (photo)

Arizona author Barry Graham has teamed with artist Vince Larue to produce Dark Heat, a graphic novel. ($148 pages, $16, pub date Sept. 26, 2012, www.barrygrahamauthor.com)

Summary from publisher:

From the macabre minds of writer Barry Graham and artist Vince Larue, Dark Heat is a contemporary hybrid of crime thriller and ghost story, set against the bleak desert cityscape of Phoenix, Arizona.

Gary Scott is a newspaper reporter who thinks he's seen everything. But when he investigates a series of grisly and bizarre killings - starting with a dog, then people, moving closer and closer to Gary - he realizes that this is like nothing he has ever encountered. Even the cops are terrified, and so Gary must work alone to find the truth, as everything he believes in proves to be false, and his reality comes apart.

Dark Heat is a tale of horror both physical and psychological, a slide into panic in which nothing is ever as it seems, and what is real is always worse than what is imagined.

Author bio:


Barry Graham is an author, journalist, screenwriter, poet and blogger whose dark and gritty urban novels have received international acclaim and whose reporting has helped more than one corrupt politician leave office. His nonfiction has been published in a diversity of magazines and newspapers, including Harper's, Flaunt, Parabola, Las Vegas Life, The Arizona Republic and Scotland on Sunday. His blog, "Illusory Flowers in an Empty Sky", contains reporting and commentary on politics, critical theory, the death penalty, urbanism, sustainability, books, boxing, films and Zen practice.

He is also a Zen monk, and serves as the Abbot of The Sitting Frog Zen Center. His book of Zen teachings, Kill Your Self: Life After Ego, was published in 2011. His novel, When It All Comes Down to Dust, was published in January 2012.

He has witnessed two executions in Florence, Arizona, at the invitation of the prisoners. His account of that experience won a FOLIO Silver Medal in the Best Single Article category, and is included in his nonfiction book Why I Watch People Die.

Barry Graham's other books include the novels The Wrong Thing, The Book of Man (chosen by the American Library Association as one of the best books of 1995), Before, How Do You Like Your Blue-Eyed Boy? and Of Darkness and Light, the story collections Scumbo and Get Out As Early As You Can, and a poetry collection, Traffic and Murder. His stories have been published in the anthologies Phoenix Noir, Send My Love and a Molotov Cocktail, Suspect Device and Intoxication. His short screenplay Holding Back the Dawn was produced in 2001.

In 2009, the French magazine Transfuge named Barry Graham one of the great "post-realist" authors. Two collections of his novels and stories, Regarde Les Hommes Mourir and Les Nuits Blanches D'Edimbourg, are published in French by Treizième Note Editions.

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