"All My Colors"

David Quantick is an author, television writer and radio broadcaster. As well as All My Colors, he wrote the surreal thriller The Mule (“the Da Vinci Code with better grammar” – The Independent) and the comic scifi novel Sparks (“excellent” – Neil Gaiman). He also wrote the critically-acclaimed TV drama Snodgrass, currently being developed into a feature film, and Dickens In Rome, a new play for Northern Stage.

Quantick has won several broadcast awards, including an Emmy as part of the writing team on Veep.

He applied the Page 69 Test to All My Colors and reported the following:

On page 69 of All My Colors, Billy Cairns – ageing alcoholic and the only person in the story who might once have been a really good writer – is in the middle of a nightmare set in a fantastical library that is also somehow a hardware store. Todd Milstead, the main character, is in it too, raging at a librarian who is also a clerk.

This scene was fun to write, because it’s hi-falutin’ (Borges references!) and horrible (blades!) and also a chance to show Todd, who’s an asshole, in full-on asshole mode. And it features Billy, one of the few characters in the book who’s really done nothing wrong but for whom everything goes wrong. Billy and Todd enjoy some moments together which are kind of tributes to the hee-hee-hee Tales of the Crypt gory humour that Stephen King does better than anyone else.

I wanted to write a book with a relentless story about a man who does a bad thing and the consequences of that thing, but along the way I ended up writing about writers and writing, and I also put it a lot more dark humour than I had intended. A lot of the scenes in this book – maybe even this one– are comic and vile at the same time.

Which is fine by me. Hee-hee-hee!

Visit David Quantick's website.

--Marshal Zeringue