LYING DOWN WITH DOGS by Mark Ayling is published

Added: (Sat Feb 04 2012)

Pressbox (Press Release) - Rod Gaylord lives a quiet life with his wife and nothing in his past but a long-forgotten misdemeanor to sully his horizon. Or so he thought. Then Dusty arrives with a jungle tan and a penchant for ballroom dancing, wanting Rod to launder money through his work's payroll. This together with a crooked and debt-ridden boss, leads Rod into a world of ill-judged affairs, a disastrous drug deal and a high speed chase across counties in a battered Austin Allegro. His life spirals out of control eventually leading to a dead girlfriend, a lost wife and mental disintegration. The story is of how even the most unassuming can unexpectedly find themselves in circumstances they are unequal to, and yet can find the resources to face ruin and affect their destiny. However, it is also about how redemption and reclamation are only ever partial. That the past is never fully escaped from and to a large extent we all choose our own downfall.


About the Author:

Mark Ayling lives and works in central London. Other authors who have influenced his writing include Elmore Leonard, J G Ballard, Albert Camus, Philip K Dick, Cormac McCarthy, Charles Bukowski and William Boyd. Mark aims to carry on writing and producing quirky, thought-provoking novels. He has another completed novel entitled Crazy Diamond and is halfway through a third novel.


Excerpt from the book:

Somewhere in the darkness an unseen helicopter plumped the sky, and from next door’s pond a frog started up like a squeaky plimsoll. He withdrew his hand from the blinds and they sprung back with a twang. Rod stood for a while gazing down at his naked body, and he gathered the slack flesh. His thoughts were vague and involved mortality. A groan made him turn; he saw Jan wave a flimsy hand as if to ward off something as she flopped over. The room was filled with a whitish light that didn’t seem to have a particular source or to emanate preferentially from any direction. It would be impossible to shut it out Rod felt, flowing round things with an inevitability that the drowning must feel. He noticed how it played over his skin, like undertaker’s fingers measuring him or gauging his weight, height, or fat content. Christ, a person could almost smell the wood. Like being in the cupboard, but horizontal rather than vertical. A cold craft dealing with the dead, Rod thought as he rubbed his face.

The world had grown quiet, the helicopter passed, and the frog brooded somewhere in the cold and damp. Utterly and completely silent. For all his sleeplessness, Rod hated silence. It represented all that he had failed to be. And as the years went by it grew ever stronger and increasingly more perilous - a black hole he would inevitably one day fall into. Time and again he’d reached this point on the edge of the abyss only to step back, lacking the courage or intellect to go further. Rod knew that essentially he was a shallow man, who couldn’t ever fully disassociate himself from the immediate needs of his body even when on the verge of something important. Then again, he reckoned not everyone was cut out to be Obi-Wan Kenobi. He headed back to bed, but as he did so Rod couldn’t shake the notion that tonight there really had been a certain disturbance in the air, and it meant something.


LYING DOWN WITH DOGS can be ordered from Amazon.co.uk at:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Lying-Down-Dogs-Mark-Ayling/dp/1908775297/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1327083336&sr=8-1

Media Contact:

Publisher: Paperbooks
Contact: Lucy Boguslawski
E-mail: lucyboguslawski@legend-paperbooks.co.uk
Tel. 0207 448 5162