Australian dark fantasy novelist Cameron Rogers is living a dream - publishing an 'extended remix' of his first novel The Music of Razors.

Cameron Rogers debut as a novelist came with the Aurealis-nominated The Music of Razors (Penguin Australia, 2001). The Penguin edition has been out of print for some time now, but with a little luck and a lot of work, Rogers found a new home for Razors at Random House in the USA - and he had the opportunity to rewrite the novel with the scope he'd originally intended for the story. It's an exciting step for an Australian author to take, and an encouraging development in dark fiction publishing in Australia.

Cover art for the Australian edition of The Music of Razors, published by Penguin Australia in 2001.

Cover art for the forthcoming expanded edition of The Music of Razors, slated for release by Random House in May 2007.

As a reader of the original Australian edition, my curiosity was perked about Razors new incarnation. Cameron kindly shared the following insights with australianhorror.com

For readers of the 2001 Penguin edition of The Music of Razors, how much have you expanded and enriched the book? Will readers recognize it?

"The new version is about 40,000 words longer, and almost all of that is extra historical chapters which make up the first half of the book. This is all stuff that makes it a deeper story, with a stronger and more solid base. It's stuff we would have loved to have included in the original Australian printing, but had to leave out for budgetary reasons. It makes it a more substantial, full-bodied story, in my opinion. Anyone who read the Australian printing will certainly recognise it, but it is a slightly different beast. The stuff that's been added is material that gives characters like Henry, Dorian, Nimble, Tub and Dorian's daughter Millicent (who only got a one-line mention in the Oz version) a chance to establish themselves as people, and to establish their influence on the course of the novel (which was really only implied, at best, in the Oz version.) The end result is that the novel is a hell of a lot stronger for it."

Was it a dream come true to ressurrect Razors, re-write it, and publish it as it was meant to be - can you tell me about that?

"Leaving out all this stuff from the Oz version nagged and nagged at me for a long time. I think I said elsewhere that for for years I felt like I'd left my kid standing on a train platform. The only reason, really, that it's seeing a second life in the States is because of a chance meeting with an old friend of my partner's. Her name is KJ Bishop, and since my girlfriend and she last met KJ went off and became an author in her own right (she wrote The Etched City, a really lush Steampunk novel.) She was nice enough to recommend me to her US agent, and here we are, basically."

What are your hopes for breaking into a wider readership?

"I haven't thought about it. I mean, this is kind of the first step toward getting enough readers to form a -ship as it is, so I guess I'll wait and see how Razors fares and go from here. The thing is though, the next book is an existential thriller and the one after that is probably going to be a steampunk fantasy and the one after that is probably going to be noir. Possibly interspersed with a kids book or two written as Rowley Monkfish. If that is how it plays out it's probably going to make it harder for a dedicated readership to track me as someone they like. I only hope I'm smart enough to work my way around that one."

Cameron Rogers in his Melbourne home, musing on Razors fate... & his next book, the existential thriller Fateless.

[ Photograph by Sarah Graves ]

THE MUSIC OF RAZORS by Cameron Rogers - A Del Rey Trade Paperback - is available for pre-order online from Random House.

Price: $13.95 (US Dollars)
ISBN: 978-0-345-49319-4
Publication Date: May 1, 2007

News Feature compiled & written by Talie Helene.

Thanks to Cameron Rogers and David Moench - Publicity Manager, Del Rey Books