THE STUDENT (Deluxe Edition)
On sale for $0.99
A little while ago, I republished a new edition of my novel THE STUDENT. I was originally intending to release a bonus zine to go with the book, drawing together a whole bunch of bonus material, but time got away from me.
Then the other week, I figured, Why not just throw all the bonus material in the back of the existing book? Which is what I’ve done.
I’ve marked the ebook down to $0.99 on Amazon for a couple of day, should you like to pick it up. There’s 75 pages (or thereabouts) of new stuff, so this feels like a good deal.
This is what’s in there, alongside the original novel:
a new afterword (see below)
an extended interview with Iain Ryan about the writing of the novel
3 deleted scenes with notes on why they were removed
an annotated playlist of all the music mentioned in the novel
a previously unpublished TV script adapted from the book.
Here’s the new afterword in full:
I wrote on The Student to distract myself. It was the summer of 2015 and I was on deadline for a long-overdue textbook. The timeline was ridiculously tight. For four months — from November to February (2016) — I wrote tens of thousands of words of academic material, drafting day after day, week after week, and the only thing that kept me going was my weird passion project: a campus noir novel set in Gatton, 1994. I worked on the novel for an hour or so each morning, to warm up.
I figured The Student would end up as a low-key self-published effort on Amazon. In the end, it became my debut novel, dropping me into the market with a product almost completely unfiltered by commercial expectation or literary ambition. It’s not a bad way to do things —to get your weirder stuff out the way early— but the truth is, I wasn’t doing that. I didn’t know what I was doing.
The book was written back when I was still working out what makes up a novel, specifically a crime novel. There’s a few tell-tale signs of this in The Student. The most obvious one is the length. It’s a very short book. A brisk forty-five thousand words. And then there’s the content. It’s insanely lurid and violent in places, including passages I wouldn’t approach the same way now. Today, I wouldn’t take portions of my biography (settings, institutions, people I knew) and marry them to the bleakest neo-noir I could dream up. It’s a bit much, is what I’m trying to say. But back then, I didn’t think too hard about the premise of my work, because I didn’t have any idea what the outcome would be. To me, it was miraculous enough that anything legible could come from my writing. In the years since, I’ve gotten better at thinking things through.
But back in 2015, all I had was a rough idea for a story and a copy of David Peace’s novel 1974, a book I used as a style manual and inspiration throughout. Peace’s novel was fast and punk and brutally effective. It mercilessly zeroed in on the historical record, turning up all sorts of unflattering detail about the time and place. Like Peace, I was writing about a highly fictionalised version of a time I lived through, and neither of us seemed capable of nostalgia or yearning. I wanted to do to 1990s Gatton what Peace did to 1970s Yorkshire. My aim, like his, was to excoriate.
The completion of the book proved tricky. In the throes of editing, I caught the train out to Castlemaine — about a hundred kilometres from Melbourne — where I camped out in a cabin on the outskirts of town. There, I overhauled The Student completely, and it didn’t come easy. By day, I was back in fucking Gatton, walking around with Nate, shotgunning redraft after redraft, reliving his descent. At night, I rode my bike along unlit roads into Castlemaine to eat dinner at the pub, alone. It felt like I was trapped in two dusty small towns, past and present, and I’ve never been lonelier. To this day, I’ve avoided writing retreats. It sounds melodramatic but that time in Castlemaine/Gatton was so wretched, that I now strive to keep everyday life as close to my writing practice as possible. I write in my office at work, or at the kitchen table at home. I avoid solitude and isolation.
Despite all the trouble, the book got done. It was published to little fanfare by Echo Publishing (and the wonderful Angela Meyer), and did reasonable business for a small-scale debut. Reader reactions were mixed. When the promotional cycle was over, I found that life continued on, as it tends to. I started work on the next project. The Student didn’t seem like such a big deal, to be honest, and it wasn’t.
But there’s one particular memory that seems pertinent. Early in the publicity roll-out for The Student, I flew back home to Queensland, and visited book stores with Echo’s sales rep. As I was signing books all over Brisbane, I noticed large merchandising displays for Jane Harper’s novel The Dry — I think the smaller ‘b-format’ of the book was on new release. I remember picking it up in the Indoorpilly QBD and looking at the rural grass field on the cover, and reading the blurb about a cop with a dark past, solving a case in a small town. The rep told me the book was selling outrageously well, and I thought, Maybe my small town crime book will get swept up in this, too?
I bought a copy, and discovered that The Dry was a very different animal. It didn’t, for instance, include pages of run-on sentences about amateur pornography, nor a protagonist who pops pills and works in a roadside McDonalds. There was no one remotely like Sock in The Dry. And in the years that followed, there were many, many ‘outback noirs’ published, so many in fact that it became a prominent sub-genre of crime fiction in Australia. Suddenly, everyone was reading about gritty, regional towns full of hidden secrets. But none of the settings felt like Gatton. The vibe was different, less chaotic. There was very little of Gatton — or places like Gatton — in these novels. Thus, The Student never became a part of that rapidly forming canon.
Commercial considerations aside, it’s a relief. I realise now that I wrote The Student to escape from Gatton (and all that it encompassed), not to venture back out there. I’ve moved on. I live in a big city now, and low sales seem like a small price to pay for keeping all that bad energy at a distant remove.
- IKR (2024)
Please consider buying the book!
— IAIN
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