June 24

Mark Brownless Q&A – The Hand of an Angel

Yesterday I shared my review of the darkly chilling The Hand of an Angel. If you missed that then you can catch up here.

This weekend is the blog tour for The Hand of an Angel and I am thrilled to be joined by author, Mark Brownless, as we chat about the nature of his story and consider why hospitals can be perfect settings for creepy tales:

 

The Hand of an Angel does get very dark in places. I had a quick check on Amazon and spotted it is ranked in Science Fiction and Fantasy classification and also Medical Thrillers – could consideration be made to class it as a Horror tale?

The book does cross a few genres, which creates its own challenges when trying to categorise and promote it for the reader – Sarah Pinborough has had huge success of late by doing this, however. There are science fiction elements, but it’s more ‘fictional science’ rather than spaceships and aliens.

Essentially The Hand of an Angel is a psychological medical thriller. It plays with the idea of reality – what is real? Do we believe all the main character says he’s seen when he has his near death experience, or is it the product of an oxygen-starved brain?

I’ve always been fascinated by unexplained phenomena like near death experience in this case, alien abduction, Nessie and Bigfoot. These type of themes lend themselves to the horror genre from the fear of the unknown, and I agree, that late on there are some more horror-type elements in the book. When I wrote the ending I had Stephen King in mind with some of his big set pieces like at the end of It and Needful Things. The tension building over the last few chapters, and the increasing presence of Hoody has that supernatural element as well. I hope people find it satisfying.

 

Much of the story is set around a hospital.  All those rooms, all those corridors, the strange contraptions and the ever present presence of illness and even death.  Does a hospital make a great setting for a thriller?  As a supplemental question…are there too few medical thrillers?

Oh yeah, hospitals make great locations. I had to build my own hospital in The Hand of an Angel, because I didn’t know of one that had all the elements I needed for the story. If we are talking about scary hospitals, one has to think of Victorian asylums. I had great fun in writing about the old parts of ‘my’ hospital and trying to make them have that kind of feel in the type of bricks used and the design of the corridors, etc. The hospital is such an integral part of the story that I’ve always felt it’s a character in itself – the old and the new struggling with each other, the underfunded research wing that hasn’t even been completed, in contrast to the ostentatious atrium foyer and glass roof.

I’m not sure if there are too few medical thrillers. I love Patricia Cornwell’s Kay Scarpetta books, but there are a lot of others in that pathologist / post mortem sub-genre. I think a medical thriller has to be intrinsically medical – it can’t just be a story that happens to be set in a hospital or with doctors and nurses, so in that sense there may be too few. There are a lot of good medical thrillers out there, though, and I hope mine measures up.

 

The one element I found most disturbing in The Hand of an Angel was the transformation in the lead character, Tom, through the story. Is it fun to build up a character to then break him down or did some guilt creep in?

The book starts off slowly with us getting to know the family at the centre of the story. I really want you to get to know them, to share some experiences with them almost as if you are part of their family. As a kid I read a lot of James Herbert. His book, The Magic Cottage, spent the first hundred pages or so building the relationship of this couple in their holiday home. I loved it and actually didn’t like it when Herbert started to pull the rug out from under them. So yes, I want you to like Tom and Sarah and the family, and I want you to be annoyed with me when bad stuff happens. Because it does.

 

What comes next from Mark Brownless?  Is there a work in progress which you can chat about?

Well I’m just about to upload the second of my Locksley short story series to Amazon for pre-order. It’s a re-telling of Robin Hood and arose from a challenge in a writing group about getting a short story written, edited, with a cover done and on pre-order within a month. I want Robin to be real and grounded, to be someone who doesn’t really have a choice with what happens to him, and to be driven by doing what is right. I’m hoping to release a chapter a month for the next few months, each with a cliff-hanger ending like those old Saturday morning serials.

My next novel again looks at reality, but this time in the form of memories. Can you trust them? Can you rely on them? And what happens when you find out that your memories aren’t quite what you thought. I decided to revisit memories and incidents of childhood, but as an adult looking back from present day. Earlier on I was talking about unexplained phenomena, and The Shadow Man will follow this theme by having a background of spontaneous human combustion, and lean a lot more to horror than The Hand of an Angel. I’m hoping to have The Shadow Man available by the end of the year.

 

Huge thanks to Mark for finding time in his busy week to answer my questions.  The Hand of an Angel is available to order here: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Hand-Angel-shattering-thriller-heart-stopping-ebook/dp/B077Y83GT1/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1529830185&sr=8-1&keywords=the+hand+of+an+angel

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June 23

The Hand of An Angel – Mark Brownless

How far would you go to get a glimpse of the afterlife, and what would you bring back?

A shattering medical thriller with a heart-stopping climax.

Devoted family man and respected cardiologist Tom Boyand is obsessed with the near-death experiences of his patients. An obsession that leaves him dead on a table with his colleagues battling desperately to resuscitate him.

But Tom has pushed the limits of the experiment too far and he’s gone for too long, seeing more of the other side than anyone before.
They get him back but he isn’t the same person. And he’s not alone.

 

My thanks to Sam at Lounge Marketing (Lounge Books) for the chance to join this blog tour and for providing a review copy.

I reviewed The Hand of An Angel a few weeks ago but now that the official tour is running I am re-sharing my review. Coming up in a few short hours will be my wee chat with Mark Brownless, but before we discuss his chilling thriller I thought a recap may help….here is what I loved about this book.

 

I cannot remember the last time I read a medical thriller, however, The Hand of an Angel made me appreciate how much I had missed them. Doctors playing God, patients suffering mysterious ailments and so many long corridors with many, many closed doors…love, love, love a good medical drama. It is pleasing to be able to confirm that The Hand of an Angel is every bit a good medical thriller!

Tom Boyand is about to embark on the final journey. But he also plans to make it a return trip and live to tell the tale. In order to cheat death he has amassed a huge wealth of medical knowledge, assembled team of researchers and physicians who can help him “die” and then bring him back to life. Everything will be carefully monitored, all done under controlled conditions and Tom hopes that he will remember exactly how it feels to die so that he can share the knowledge.

The first half of the novel draws readers into Tom’s world. His project, his colleagues, his family and we get a very good idea as to the type of person that Tom is…a nice guy!

When the time comes to begin his experiment we are excited for Tom and his team and as a reader I was also keen to find out what he may experience after his death. Suffice to say I was shocked by how the story changed – perhaps I should have read the blurb before reading…

Tom becomes a changed man. His easygoing personality changes and he becomes paranoid, suspicious, aggressive and confrontational. Having spent so much time getting to know Tom it is upsetting to see the changes he appears to be undergoing. More so when when we see the impact it is having on his family and friends. Mark Brownless handles this change in dynamic brilliantly and it makes for gripping reading.

Unfortunately for Tom he has more pressing problems to contend with than a change to his moods. He believes that he may not have returned from the dead on his own. Tom keeps seeing the same strange figure in different places he visits…at work, at home and he cannot understand why other people don’t appear to notice.

What had been a great medical thriller now becomes a dark and sinister tale. The change up in tension is marked and it had me flicking the pages like a demon (as it were) trying to reach the end of the book as quickly as I could so I could find out what happened. And Wow.

This story totally sucked me in – what more could a reader ask for?

 

The Hand of an Angel is available in paperback and digital format. You can order a copy here: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Hand-Angel-Mark-Brownless/dp/1976248744/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=1527016541&sr=8-1

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