Friday Freebie: The Iconoclast’s Journal by Terry Griggs

Congratulations to Phil Milio, winner of last week’s Friday Freebie: Lullaby Road by James Anderson.

This week’s giveaway is for The Iconoclast’s Journal by Terry Griggs. Here’s what a couple of reviews had to say about the novel:

“...smashes apart Victorian society (and modern society by extension) and rebuilds it as a Swiftian fantasy, raucous as Huckleberry Finn and nearly as bizarre as Alice in Wonderland…intensely intoxicating and bestowing delicious feelings of hallucination.” (Quill & Quire)

“Terry Griggs’ second novel is as exuberantly inventive, verbally juiced up and sexually outrageous as her first, The Lusty Man―and more pointedly iconoclastic….The language, the verbal fireworks, the apparently limitless stream of image and metaphor―startling, heady, hilarious―do it all.” (The Globe and Mail)

Personally, I was hooked by the opening sentence of the novel, which goes like this: In the month of May, 1898, on his wedding night, Thomas Griffith Smolders was chased around his hotel room, not by his bride, as you might expect, but by a ball of fire—luminous and strangely cool.

I have a new paperback copy of the novel from the publisher, Biblioasis, to give away (please note: the inside cover is stamped “Review copy,” but apart from that, it’s a finished copy of the book). Keep scrolling for more information on the novel and how to enter the contest...

Spooked by some ball lightning on his wedding night, repressed young Catholic Griffith Smolders interprets this as a sign and abandons his conjugal responsibilities by escaping through the window, enduring a series of misadventures along the way involving, among others, con men, murderesses, shipwrecks, and autodidact biologist hermits. Giving chase, his betrothed, Avice Drinkwater, finally runs Grif aground in a tiny island community, and prepares to exact her revenge. Set in the rough-and-tumble late nineteenth-century backwoods, The Iconoclast’s Journal is wildly kinetic, a madcap picaresque and comic anti-romance by one of the most inventive writers at work today.

If you’d like a chance at winning The Iconoclast’s Journal, simply email your name and mailing address to

thequiveringpen@gmail.com

Put FRIDAY FREEBIE in the e-mail subject line. Please include your mailing address in the body of the e-mail. One entry per person, please. Despite its name, the Friday Freebie remains open to entries until midnight on Dec. 27, at which time I’ll draw the winning name. I’ll announce the lucky reader on Dec. 28. If you’d like to join the mailing list for the once-a-week newsletter, simply add the words “Sign me up for the newsletter” in the body of your email. Your email address and other personal information will never be sold or given to a third party (except in those instances where the publisher requires a mailing address for sending Friday Freebie winners copies of the book).

Want to double your odds of winning? Get an extra entry in the contest by posting a link to this webpage on your blog, your Facebook wall or by tweeting it on Twitter. Once you’ve done any of those things, send me an additional e-mail saying “I’ve shared” and I’ll put your name in the hat twice.