My Female First Interview

If you had told me when I started writing The Poacher's Son that I would one day be profiled in "the UK’s number 1 online women’s celebrity gossip and lifestyle magazine," I would have laughed out loud. But today that is exactly where you will find me. Female First has an exclusive interview with me up on its site. I'm not on the front page where the juicy stuff lives. (Did you know that Lindsay Lohan has lost her legal battle with Pitbull? Neither did I.) Still, it's not bad for a boy from the backwoods of Maine. 

 

What It Feels Like to Be Struck by Lightning

I have written about being struck by lightning on several occasions, but the Independent in London recently asked me to give an account for its "Five-Minute Memoir" series to coincide with the publication of The Poacher's Son in the United Kingdom.

Here's an excerpt:

On the first night I suffered from dark dreams: I was a soldier on a muddy, bloody battlefield; then a phone rang telling me my mother had just died. The next day, as darkness fell and mist turned to rain, I dreaded the thought of sleep. Before turning in, I decided to move my tent from under a balsam fir into the centre of the clearing.

Two hours later I was awakened by a crack of thunder. I lay on my side, listening as rain drove against the tarp, feeling the fabric shiver in the wind. Lightning flashed again and again. I tried to go back to sleep.

It all happened in an instant: the pulse of white light, the burning pain of electricity coursing through my body, the jolt of being blasted off the ground. The sound of the explosion lagged a split-second behind. For moments afterward, I lay paralysed, breathless, unbelieving.

You can read the rest here. As you can imagine, there's a lot more to the story than what I've written in this essay, and like most harrowing adventures it's best retold in person, usually over drinks. Eventually, I expect to weave my near-death experience into a novel—although Mike Bowditch is so luckless I can't imagine inflicting near electrocution on him as well!

"Suspenseful and Gripping"

John Cleal has a glowing review of The Poacher's Son up today at Reviewing the Evidence:

But it is the wilderness itself and its animal inhabitants that are the real stars of this book. Doiron is a registered Maine guide and his love of one of the few remaining unspoiled stretches of north east America is almost palpable and his wonderfully evocative descriptions drag you into the tangle of bogs, giant trees and dense undergrowth that frame Mike's working life. You feel his character's anger at the heartless developers, constantly buying up land for exclusive developments for the rich and threatening to end a way of life that has existed for generations.

Doiron combines a love story with his pain at the state's shrinking wilderness with a study of a son struggling to love and be loved by his father, and in the process provides a gripping murder mystery. THE POACHER'S SON has already won awards in America and should collect plenty more.

Fingers crossed. 

"Precision, clarity and a keen sense of plot"

The Poacher's Son has just been published in the UK by Constable & Robinson, and reviews are beginning to appear in the journals and Web sites there. It's thrilling to experience the release of my debut all over again, especially in the land that created the detective novel. Here's what We Love This Book has to say:

Paul Doiron writes with precision, clarity and a keen sense of plot. The story of a son trying to prove his father’s innocence is well handled in terms of both suspense and surprise; this is not a story in which the ending can be confidently foretold. 

I'll be posting other reviews as they appear.