HARD EIGHT 🎱
Lana, The Dream, and some recent reading.
I’m listening to the new Guided By Voices’ album Universe Room as I write this in the living room of my apartment. My son is lying on the couch playing Zelda while his sister works on a drawing at the coffee table. It’s another summer morning in Melbourne, February 2025.
🎢 News
My novel The Dream has been out for two months now. It’s making its way in the world. In terms of sales, it’s not burning as brightly as The Strip (2024), but its hitting with my people. It’s a book people are emailing me about.
If you enjoyed The Dream, please consider posting a short review on Amazon and Goodreads.
My favourite review of the book is here, courtesy of The Newtown Review of Books and Ben Ford Smith (who is no stranger to the setting/history). I mean, he’s right, this is actually what I’m aiming to do:
Australian crime fiction has enjoyed widening readerships over the last ten years, bearing literary sensibilities and rural settings evoking the country’s harsh and beautiful landscapes. Ryan’s fiction pukes all over this image of Australia.
My favourite interview this time out was with Alex Dook for Words and Nerds. Alex recently signed with my old publisher Echo, and has a crime book out later this year.
🏦 More News
My next novel The Casino is already written and in edits. It’s pencilled in for release in January, 2026 (via Ultimo). I’ll talk more about it closer in, but I feel like this one is more noir and less hardboiled. It centres around three characters: Lana Cohen (from The Strip), Ewan Hayes, a private detective holing up in the Saturn Casino, and ‘Miami’ Vince Walters, a broken Internal Investigations cop.
🎥 Currently Watching
I’m enjoying the second season of Severance, but finding the rest of TV hard to come at. Are we in the valley of writer’s strike? I tried Bad Monkey (based off handsome Carl Hiaasen’s great Miami novels) but the show looked like 90s network television, and I tapped out during the second episode.
I have Letterboxed now, and as you can see, I’m not having a lot of luck with films either. A rewatch of Lynch’s Wild At Heart was a revelation. Longlegs was fine, good even. Carry-On and The Substance were terrible, but I’ll begrudgingly admit that that latter actually did a thing.
‘A thing’ is not nothing, especially in 2025, but the vibe has unambigiously shifted. Can’t you feel it? What worked 2 years ago, does not work now, and no amount of goodwill and righteous zeal can get 2023 energy across the line. No one winces at those cliches and tropes now and thinks, I must be a bad person. Even the most right-on among us are deeply, deeply bored.
👨🏻🦲 Billy Corgan Interviewing Gene Simmons
This debut episode from Billy Corgan’s (Smashing Pumpkins) new podcast is not for the uninitiated. It’s not particularly good: two bizarrely dressed men in a room, talking past each other about classic rock. Unfortunately, I am the ideal listener for this. Many such cases. 100% subscribed.
📖 Currently Reading
David Whish-Wilson’s last book Cutler is incredible. A highly skilled prose writer, and riding a bit of creative streak, DW-W is deep in the pocket on this. It’s got it all: noir energy, locked room energy, Wake In Fright energy. Set on a fishing boat, the thing is drenched in saltwater and sweat. I raced through it.
Adrian Hyland’s The Wireglass is almost the polar opposite. His setting is Alpine cool and crisp. Ostensibly a rural noir / small town mystery, Hyland wins out by not plotting like a literary writer slumming it (he might disagree with this characterisation). The Wireglass has a hectic, highly melodramatic conclusion. A central plot point concerns the main character caught shagging. Thus, there’s a pulp heart underneath the hood of this banger.
🎧 Listen To Me
I noticed that two of my audiobooks are now available on Spotify. I have no idea what I get paid for these streams — but as a music industry academic by day, I can all but guarantee that I’m being financially abused.
I don’t mind.
I’m so far from earning out on the The Spiral’s audio rights that a billion streams wouldn’t change it; and by all reports the audio production of that book is excellent (dual narrators, foley sound effects, etc).
I’ve made my money on The Strip, so listen to that at will. Just do me a favour and buy The Dream if book 1 of the quartet works for you.
👸🏼 Lana Loves The Dream
So I posted this back at the start of the roll-out for The Dream and I got a lot of DMs either congratulating me, or asking if it was real.
A: Of course, it isn’t real.
Lana exists in the liminal zone between physical reality and untrammelled American desire, and as such, this image can never be real. It’s something else: it’s better than real. Unreal, even.
And yet there it is:
Stay distracted.
END
— IAIN
