Arts
Man and his words
VICKI GILHULA
Fall 2008 |
“Steven has a terrific rock band, Stray Bullet, featuring a 13-year-old female vocalist (Colleen Kirkness), who I believe will be as big as Avril Lavigne one day soon,” he says.
He suggests the magazine write about his new book and his son’s band. As it happens, Here After, is a father and son story. The main character, like Costello, is a doctor living in Sudbury. He called on his experience as a dad to write the paranormal thriller about a missing child.
“We have a fascination with death...it is a dark attraction. It is mixed up with the hope that when we die, it isn’t the end of things,” says Costello about why paranormal thrillers are a popular genre.
This is Costello’s sixth book. This is a big deal for any writer, let alone one who has a full-time job as an anesthesiologist at Sudbury Regional Hospital. Costello, 57, is very modest. He is surprised anyone remembers the books he wrote in the early 1990s.
Costello’s first attempts at writing received good reviews. He developed a following in Sudbury. Eden’s Eyes, Captain Quad, and The Cartoonist were published by Pocket Books, a division of Simon & Schuster. The Cartoonist was optioned for a movie.
The publisher asked for a book a year, but Costello turned down the contract to concentrate on being a dad. Now that Steven is 16, he has more time to write.
His more recent novels Finders Keepers and Sandman were thrillers and may have disappointed horror fans, but Costello hopes they will enjoy Here After, a ghost story with thriller elements.
In Sandman, Costello wrote about a pychopathic anesthesiologist who puts his patients to sleep for good. Readers have come to expect him to cause the tiny hairs on the back of their necks to stand up. They don’t expect him to make them cry. Here After is an emotional ride.
After he wrote the first chapter, he couldn’t read it for several months. It then took about six months to get the first draft written. He wrote on weekends, holidays, and at night. He admits to being “a bit of an insominac.”
His manuscript attracted attention from agents and publishers in New York, but they were concerned about that first chapter. “I got very nice rejection letters,” he says. They wanted him to change the opening chapter. He wouldn’t. “It is pivotal to the story. I like the story the way it is.”
Laurence Steven, a Laurentian University professor who owns Your Scrivener Press, is delighted to be publishing Costello’s Here After.
“I asked him why he wasn’t going to the ‘big boys’ (publishers),” Steven remembers.
Costello told him he would prefer to work at a slower pace and closer with his publisher, the very things Your Scrivener Press offers.
Costello may not have the same kind of mass sales he had with his first three books, “which were in every drugstore, but that is OK with him,” says Steven.
Steven praises Here After. “It is a great book, right up there with Captain Quad and The Cartoonist.”
He is confident it will be well received by Costello’s loyal fan base.
“Costello’s fan base has remained surprisingly faithful and wide—everyone from 11-year-old kids to 80-year-old grandmothers...,” says Steven.
The cover art work was done by artist Amy Bradley.
Here After will sell for $22. Proceeds will go to Child Find, an organization Costello came to admire while doing research for the book.
Steven Costello and his band are expected to play at Dad’s book’s launch party in October.
