I love when a book doesn’t wait politely at the door but kicks it in and drags you straight into the story. A Good Day to Die is exactly that kind of book. We’ve already reviewed it before, and if you missed that first look you can catch up here.
But today is even better. Today you get the actual first chapter.
There’s a crooked charm to this book, the kind that hits like a bruise you can’t help pressing again. It’s fast, gritty and never gentle. Even the quieter moments carry that edge, like a hand hovering a little too close to a knife. It keeps you reading because every page feels like a dare.
Rawlins is not here to charm you. He’s here to survive, cause trouble, and make you raise an eyebrow more than once. The world he walks through is sharp and unforgiving, full of people whose moral compasses are… let’s call them flexible. If you enjoy stories with attitude, teeth and characters who might stab you or save you depending on the weather, then you’re in the right place.
So, enough talking.
Here’s your sneak peek:
Chapter One
When you leave someone to die a long, slow, painful death, stick around to enjoy it. Start a fire, cook some food, have a drink, and revel in the pain you worked so hard to inflict and at not insignificant risk to yourself. Sing songs, throw insults, but most important of all, make sure they’re actually fucking dead before you leave.
Those that came for me didn’t do any of those things and they’re going to regret it.
Every last one of them.
That it had taken seven of the most vicious bastards ever to walk the Six Kingdoms to track me down, seven of my closest, dearest friends, was a mark of personal pride. The fact that I’d crawled out of the swamp and currently lay, gasping and swearing, staring up at the stars was little more than luck.
At this moment, I was stuck fast and spent a few heartbeats of precious time making a mental list of my wounds, storing the pain for the future. Edlynne’s dagger had left a nasty wound along my ribs, and the hilt had become entangled in my tunic. A deep, stinging cut in the bicep of my arm from Dorith’s knives. My nose which, judging by the double vision, difficulty breathing, and the way in which it bent way over to the right, had been broken by Storm’s fists. The flaring pain in my right knee, a result of Estra’s quick kicks. I was missing a chunk of flesh from my left thigh which Ody’s hatchet had removed, and, for good measure, I was pretty sure I had a few broken ribs on the other side, a gift from Leax’s staff. Lastly, a slice across my stomach the length of two fingers which continued to leak blood over my sodden woollen tunic courtesy of Aethelhere’s sword.
I can see them, in my mind’s eye, poling their little boats, probably stolen, their original owners likely floating face down in the brackish water, along the myriad waterways which criss-crossed the fens. The setting sun to their backs and their self-congratulations loud on the breeze.
Bastards.
Every curse, every insult, had flown from my split lips. I’d promised hell’s tender mercies upon them. A red-hot poker up the arse. Balls cut off, roasted before their eyes and fed to mean-eyed hellhounds whose salivating jaws wanted nothing more than to consume the rest of their body. To be gutted and the contents of their stomachs dragged out with wicked hooks and force fed to each other. Their sternum to be split and chest ripped apart while the last stuttering beats of their heart kept them alive long enough to enjoy every moment of sweet agony.
I’d threatened to find their mothers, the whores, the farm animals, the monsters who’d given birth to them in some fetid alleyway and cut their throats, letting their black demon blood spill across the cobbles. To gather up their relatives and sell them on the slave blocks. I was going to find the graves of their ancestors, grind the bones into meal, bake it into bread and serve it to them on a platter made of the skulls.
If I could think of it, I said it and meant every damn word.
However, half my anger was self-directed and fully justified. It was my own fault they’d found me. My over-confidence, my sleep-deprived illusion of safety, and the sure knowledge that no one would follow me into the fens. The sin of complacency for which I could never forgive myself.
They’d caught me taking a nap and I’d tried to run. I’d failed.
I got a couple of nicks and cuts in. Nothing that would kill, unless one of the worms, bugs or parasites which called these fens home found a way into a wound. I hoped and prayed for that. If the gods chose not to listen to me, I couldn’t blame them, I’ve never listened to them. I was more a sharp knife to the neck of a fat priest with a fatter gold purse than a man given to prayer and charity.
They’d left me, up to my chest in a pool of fine fetid fen mud. Every cut, slash, gash burning in agony. Sinking deeper and deeper all the time. Each bubble which rose to the surface popped with the stench of rotting plant and animal matter. I’d gagged and wanted to vomit, but lack of food and sheer, uncompromising terror mixed with a belly-aching, incandescent rage made that impossible.
When I lost sight of them behind the floating hummocks of vegetation which meandered without aim throughout these ever-changing waterways, the rage had fled and the panic set in. I flapped at the water, splashing more of the putrid, shit smelling liquid into the air. I’d screamed and the water landed in my mouth, on to my tongue. I swallowed and grimaced at the foul taste. Tears born of desperation only added to the rising level of brown water all about me.
It had reached my armpits when those gods I’d once cursed, stolen from, whose flocks I’d fleeced and followers I’d murdered, granted me the miracle of one more chance. My foot, the one under my injured knee, touched something solid. Something which didn’t move. I probed at it with my toes, seeking traction, a way to arrest my descent into the muck. At that moment, I’d have taken an anvil off a passing blacksmith if he’d told me that it would save my life.
Drowning wasn’t the way I wanted to die, and though everyone knew you couldn’t drown in quicksand, in the mud and tidal waters of the fens it was a far too common way to go. I’d always imagined living forever in a palace carpeted with gold and a multitude of nubile virgins to service my every whim and demand. A man needs a dream in which to escape the nightmare we call life even if he knows it stands no chance of ever coming true.
My questing foot found a stone, a branch, root, a body, something. Four and half feet down through cloying mud and water it was impossible to say what it was. I didn’t care. I stopped sinking.
In my escape, my wild race across the floating islands, the splashes through the little rivers, I hadn’t taken the greatest care. At that moment, the seven bastards close behind me, the sharp blades they carried, and their desire to end my life in a deeply unpleasant way had been my overriding concern. I’d been out of choices and stupid.
A deadly combination.
The patch of ground had looked solid. As solid as anything looks in the fens and I was raised here. I should have known, should have realised, but running for your life, a knife in your shoulder, holding your guts together tends to dull your thinking. Any other day, yesterday for instance, I’d have skirted around the quickmud and let one of them get caught. It was on my fifth or sixth step when realisation had finally hit me full on in the face.
I’d done everything a succession of uncles had taught me about survival. The useful ones had shown me how to use a knife, a bow, how to fish, how to avoid the monsters which made this place home. They’d taught me which plants were safe and useful, which were deadly, and which could be sold for a profit. There was a fair degree of crossover in the categories, if I’m honest.
The shit ones had taught me how to duck a punch, how to take a beating, and how to sleep outside while they either fucked my mother or beat her too. Being young is nothing to enjoy, just to endure.
As I began to sink, I’d thrown myself forward, spreading my weight as much as possible. I felt the water creep into my long boots, an affection I’d picked up in the cities and something a fen-dweller wouldn’t be caught dead in. Now I knew why.
Crawling forward, fingers digging into the muck and arms straining to pull my almost dead weight forward just forced more water and more muck into those boots. Thinking back, I’d have better spent the first heartbeats stripping those boots from my feet. I didn’t, and hindsight, miserable bastard that it is, kept reminding me of that. Those boots were expensive and when you’ve had nothing, you cling on to the things you eventually possess. Whether you’ve earned them through honest labour or, as in my case, theft.
My boots just got heavier and my progress towards the next island halted. I started to sink. Struggling made it worse. Every movement created a little more space for me to sink into. Mud and water climbed my legs, my thighs, past my sorely neglected genitals and up over my waist, like cold grasping hands of the dead, waxy skin and the slime of decomposition under their fingernails, dragging me down.
This thing beneath my foot, a little anchor of safety, gave me a chance and I’d not waste it. Ever so slowly, careful not to disturb my perch, my other foot sought something similar in the clinging muck. Already broken and knackered from the panic and struggle, it took ten minutes of sweating, crying and cursing to find the next lump of safety.
Now that I had something beneath both feet and wasn’t sinking, I could work out a means of escape. Quickmud forms where water wells up from the rocks and mud below, from the tides and mix of salt and freshwater, and I’d lost a friend or two during my early years to it. There wasn’t much I could do about the boots, but a couple of feet away and just out of reach was the broken branch off of some straggly fenland tree, resting rather than floating on the brackish surface.
Inching my belt from around my waist, I tied a knot near the buckle to make a simple grappling hook. Not a good one, and on the first throw I almost fell off my narrow pedestal and died. The second throw missed as did the third, fourth, fifth and sixteenth. The seventeenth landed plum over the branch, snagged on a broken twig, and with slow tugs on the belt I drew the stick into reach.
It wasn’t much, but it wasn’t rotten either. It was balance and buoyancy in the quickmud. Holding it in both hands, flat against the surface, it gave me the confidence to reach forward with a foot and seek another little piece of rock, wood or root.
The moon climbed into the sky, the stars came out and wheeled in their unending way across the night as I struggled from perch to pedestal, from stone to root. My cuts stung, and infection would be finding purchase. Parasites and bugs would be infiltrating my flesh but, and this was key, I wasn’t dead yet.
It was past midnight when I reached the dubious safety of an island and another hour of sweating and swearing to drag myself onto it. Now I lay staring up at those stars and counted my wounds, listed my grievances and lusted for revenge.
A few hours’ sleep wouldn’t hurt any more than being awake. My tunic was tied tight around the wound in my stomach, half a torn legging was staunching the flow of blood from my shoulder, and another section was tied around the wound in my arm.
I ain’t the smartest, the strongest, quickest or deadliest blade in Esadale, but all seven of them were going to learn I was the most fucking stubborn son of a starving goat to stagger out of the fens. Aethelhere most of all. Their leader and full-on bastard who’d once called himself my friend.
Today had been a good day to die.
It hadn’t been my day.
If chapter one grabbed you by the collar, trust me, it doesn’t let go. Rawlins is a disaster you absolutely want to follow, and if you enjoyed watching him suffer this much already, you’re going to have an excellent time. The man attracts trouble like trouble owes him money.
If you want the rest of this glorious mess, get your copy here.
About the author
After studying for a Diploma in Creative Writing, G. R. Matthews taught the subject at A Level and holds a BSc (Hons) in Geography. He currently works in education with a focus on Child Protection and Safeguarding, and writes in the evenings between convincing his children to go to bed and resisting the urge to binge Eureka. He’s trained (and been hit a lot) in Judo, Kung fu, Wing Chun and Kickboxing, claims no great skill in any (see: being hit), and is a long-time D&D enthusiast who favours the rogue. A self-taught guitarist, he sometimes even sings — and most of the audience has recovered. At night he dreams that Spielberg, Lucas, or Keanu Reeves reads his books and calls about a film deal. He lives with his long-suffering wife, two children, and two hamsters who show him the respect he deserves.
Jennie Ivins