Episode 175 - Colin Leonard - Country Roads

Overview

Colin is Irish and used tales of his homeland to create his horror novel, Country Roads.

When Luke Sheridan moves out of Dublin city to rural Kilcross with his wife and baby, he imagines the worst part will be his extended commute to work. They can look forward to enjoying the countryside and being part of a small community. After all, his old friend Declan Maguire lives in the house next door and is a Garda in the nearest town.

But Declan’s devilish attitude towards drink, drugs and women means trouble is never far from his door. And worse, gruesome murders and the appearance of sinister figures at night mean the countryside is becoming a very dangerous place to live.

Country Roads —don’t go outside alone.

Book

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Website

https://colinleonard.com

YouTube

Transcript

Stephen: today on discover wordsmiths, I have Colin Leonard, how are you doing today, sir?

Colin: I’m great. Thanks very much.

Stephen: Oh,

Colin: please. No. I’m my book was just released yesterday and we had a launch party the day before. So I’m this is a timely interview as well. I’m all about the book at the

Stephen: moment. Nice. Awesome. All right. So launch party, congrats. Was it fun?

Colin: Yeah, no, it was great.

It was Bridgescape Press, my publisher organized this and we had a good few people online and yeah, just had a great time and nice chat about folk horror.

Stephen: Nice. And that’s the book Country Roads, which we’re going to talk about in a few minutes. But before we get to the book, tell us a little bit about yourself where you live and some of the things you like to do besides writing.

Colin: So I live in County Mead in Ireland in a little rural, it’s not even a village, it’s a little tiny cottage with a scrap of land that keeps me busy when I’m not writing, repairing the house and trying to keep the field from growing too wild apart from that, I have a young family. So the rest of my time is taken up with.

Their activities, which they are big into sports and music. So we get to bring them here and there, watch their matches and watch their performances. So that’s Yeah, it’s a lovely age that they are at the moment. What do they play? Two of them play piano, one plays violin and they play soccer and cricket as

Stephen: well.

Wow, nice. Yeah I had piano lessons when I was young and still play music. So it’s a great thing for kids. Yeah, definitely approve.

Colin: Yeah, no, it is. It is fantastic to do it.

Stephen: So let me ask with a family and everything, why did you want to start writing and why’d you want to write horror?

Colin: I’ve always been writing on and off.

From when I was a kid, I was always encouraged by my parents and my school teachers my, we were made aware. All the time that my grandfather was a poet, he had stuff published in the national newspapers. So he was a farmer in the truck driver as well, but he took the time to write poetry. Then leading into secondary school, I continued writing genre type stuff and entering it into competitions, some of which I won and got into the school magazine and that kind of thing. But life takes you in different places. Even though i did english literature in college i didn’t end up working in that i did different things travel different places but once my life became more settled and i got a bit older i became more focused on trying to get published and concentrating on.

Learning my craft a bit more and given a bit more time to writing.

Stephen: Nice. Nice. Okay. So your book is called country roads. And it’s full core. Tell us a little bit about the book. So

Colin: it’s as you say, it’s called country roads and it’s set in Rural ireland in somewhere similar to where I live and where I grew up.

It’s about a