Books » October

In the waning years of the 1990s, in an isolated rural town called Auburn, dark secrets run like blood. Everyone knows that sixteen-year old Mikey Childress is "different." A target for bullies since he was a small boy, everything Mikey does attracts abuse: the way he walks, the way he talks, the way he looks. But even the people who hate Mikey couldn't dream of how many secrets he has, or how badly he could hurt them if he wanted to. Until the night Mikey is pushed beyond endurance, the night he inadvertently opens a doorway that should never, ever have been opened, and unleashes something into the world that should have remained damned.

Praise for October

• "A dark and deeply affecting novel. I loved it." Robert Levy, author of The Glittering World
• "October is one of the most affecting stories I have read in recent years, an unrelenting attack on your emotions coupled with a heartwarming tale of a fragile friendship between two social outcasts will take you on a wild ride of shame, sympathy and sorrow. Its assertive and dogmatic approach to the subject matter is a for want of a better word a joy to read, this is a difficult read but one that rewards the reader with an exceptional reading experience and an ending that will drop even the most square of jaws." The Ginger Nuts of Horror
• "[October] is a beautifully crafted tale of desire and alienation, love and betrayal, power and loss ... all in the Faustian sense. Do yourself a favour and pick up a copy." David Baillie, author of What We Salvage and Little Bones
• "Michael Rowe is one of those writers who can swing from the eloquent prose of a Peter Straub to the brutality of a Richard Laymon." Monster Librarian
• "Rowe’s tale of teenage anguish and loneliness is an exquisitely told cautionary tale, rich in visceral images of horror and the erotic." Vince Liaguno, editor of the Bram Stoker Award-winning Unspeakable Horror: From the Shadows of the Closet
• "October is the kind of horror novel a lot of adults needed when they were kids. Michael Rowe understands that while it gets better for some people, not everyone can afford to sit back and wait if they want to survive. A powerful and powerfully frightening tale about making hard choices in the name of survival, and what those choices cost. Because becoming who you are really means making a deal with the Devil. And sometimes, the Devil is the only one who really understands." Bracken MacLeod, author of Stranded and 13 Views of the Suicide Woods
• "Michael Rowe's talent shines through in this terrifying story of social persecution, black magic, and desire gone horrifically wrong. Readers will immediately identify with the story of Mikey Childress, and they'll hold on for dear life as Mikey's search for acceptance and a dream of love drag them across a jagged terrain of brutality and indifference. With October, Rowe taps into the primal terrors of a teen’s life, exploring the loneliness and misery of an outcast who finds his only salvation in a vicious, dark place." Lee Thomas, Lambda Literary Award- and Bram Stoker Award-winning author of The German and Down on Your Knees

Praise for Michael Rowe

• "[Wild Fell is a] superb ghost story that evokes terrors both ancient and modern, and delivers us to a place of profound fear." Clive Barker
• "[A] major new talent. Michael Rowe is now on my must-read list." Christopher Rice
• "[Wild Fell] by Canadian author Michael Rowe fulfills the Hobbesian ideal of a haunted house novel: nasty, brutish and short. Also, elegant. With more than a little meta-fictional self-awareness—another trope of the haunted house novel post-1820, when the genre was already centuries old—Rowe tells the story of damaged ingénue Jameson Browning, who purchases the titular mansion on a lake-locked outcropping called Blackmore Island after an accident which puts him in possession of a sizable cash settlement. The ghosts are also real in Rowe, this time in the visage of Rosa Blackmore, a spectral teenager who makes known her presence in grim, strobic flashes around the estate. And yet, as in all the best haunted house stories, the specter in Wild Fell is more than just that; it's a powerful human emotion made flesh—or un-flesh, as the case may be. While over it all loom the spires of Wild Fell: dwelt in by Jameson, dwelling in him." Electric Lit
• "Michael Rowe writes like a storyteller, so seamlessly that the words disappear under your skin." Susie Moloney for CBC Manitoba