DONʼT DREAM ITʼS OVER (now on submission)
It’s been only eight months since Jonathan and Alicia Crane’s daughter died of SIDS…days before her first birthday. What happened to Ellie was no one’s fault, but Jonathan, a novelist, is searching for a way to atone, anyway. One that doesn’t involve drowning his sorrows in whiskey.
He gets his chance on a sunny afternoon in rural Arkansas when a man driving a giant pickup runs him off the road and knocks him unconscious. Jonathan awakens in a remote cabin, hands and feet bound with ropes. The angry redneck demands to know why, in his first novel (for which he was paid an enormous sum), Jonathan betrayed the rural community where he grew up. If he doesn’t offer a satisfactory answer, he might never leave the cabin alive.
Eventually the redneck’s girlfriend unties the ropes, and Jonathan decides to use his abduction as the inciting incident in an explosive new novel that will help Alicia let go of her grief and set them free financially. But Jonathan is too embarrassed to tell his wife what really happened in the woods, and the redneck’s girlfriend begins posting on Jonathan’s social media and sending text messages that make it look like he was unfaithful.
When a handsome, genteel suitor comes along to tempt his wife, as tormentors close in from all sides, Jonathan becomes increasingly convinced the new manuscript is the only way to win back Alicia’s heart. But the deeper he descends into his story, the fuzzier the line between fiction and reality becomes. Is Jonathan composing the reality he wants to live? Or is someone behind the curtain pulling the strings of their lives?
If Richard Yates wrote House of Leaves, the result might read like Don’t Dream It’s Over—an acerbic novel about the challenge of finding common ground while a world of electronic media and news propaganda conspires to tear us apart. It’s a story that explores the intersection between fantasy and reality, that examines how so many of us are being left behind by the ongoing march of late capitalism.
HOUSE OF THE RISING SUN
“Riveting…paints a striking picture of America’s collapse. Readers will be enthralled.” – Publishers Weekly
“A relentlessly thrilling and endlessly entertaining page-turner; the kind of book that keeps you up way past bedtime.” – Jonathan Evison, New York Times bestselling author of Lawn Boy
“Has a literary sensibility with a thriller’s premise and pacing while exploring vital questions within post-apocalyptic America.” – Vanessa Lillie, Amazon bestselling author of Little Voices and For the Best
“Stark in its treatment of a culture’s fall and revealing in its contrast between one’s willingness to embrace the alien in the name of virtue… House of the Rising Sun serves as an allegory for what happens when folks steel their sense of materialism and entitlement in lieu of their potential for virtue and independence from the cold front of human vitriol.” – Michel Sabbagh for The Southern Review of Books
Both a frightening apocalyptic story set in the southern United States and a character-focused, deeply moving literary thriller.
What would happen if technology all over the world suddenly stopped working?
When a strange new star appears in the sky, human life instantly grinds to a halt. Across the world, anything and everything electronic stops working completely.
At first, the event seems like a bizarre miracle to Seth Black–it interrupts his suicide attempt and erases gambling debt that threatened to destroy his family. But when Seth and his wife, Natalie, realize the electricity isn’t coming back on, that their the food supplies won’t last, they begin to wonder how they and their two sons will survive.
Meanwhile, screenwriter Thomas Phillips–an old friend of Natalie’s–has just picked up Skylar Stover, star of his new movie, at the airport when his phone goes dead and planes begin to fall from the sky.
Thomas has just completed a script about a similar electromagnetic event that ended the world. Now, he’s one of the few who recognizes what’s happening and where it will lead.
When Thomas and Skylar decide to rescue Natalie and Seth, the unwilling group must attempt to survive together as the world falls apart. They try to hide in Thomas’s home and avoid desperate neighbors, but fear they’ll soon be roaming the streets with starving refugees and angry vigilantes intent on forming new governments. It’s all they can do to hold on to each other and their humanity.
Yet all the while, unbeknownst to them, Aiden Christopher–a bitter and malignant man leveraging a crumbling society to live out his darkest, most amoral fantasies–is fighting to survive as well. And he’s on a collision course with Thomas, Skylar, and the Black family…
“This beautifully written supernatural thriller is vibrantly original and his characters are intricately detailed.” —Booklist
“The mind-blowing aspects of this complex, challenging novel build slowly, inexorably, to a climax that involves a storm to end all storms. And it is glorious.” —Barnes & Noble Sci-Fi Blog
“The Boys of Summer is is speculative fiction, science fiction, historical fiction, and fantasy, incorporating political, economic, and religious philosophies. It reminds me simultaneously of Stand by Me, The Omen, and The Truman Show.” —Lone Star Literary Life
Both a haunting coming-of-age story set in North Texas against the backdrop of a deadly tornado, and a character-driven, deeply-affecting supernatural thriller. In 1979, a massive tornado devastates the city of Wichita Falls, Texas, leaving scores dead, thousands homeless, and nine-year-old Todd Willis in a coma, fighting for his life. Four years later, Todd awakens to a world that looks the same but feels different in a way he can’t quite grasp. For Todd, it’s a struggle to separate fact from fiction as he battles lingering hallucinations from his long sleep. The new friends Todd makes in 1983 are fascinated with his experience and become mesmerized by his strange relationship with the world. Together the five boys come of age during a dark, fiery summer where they find first love, betrayal, and a secret so terrible they agree to never speak of it again. But darkness returns to Wichita Falls twenty-five years later, and the boys–now men–are forced to reunite and confront the wounds from their past. When their memories of that childhood summer refuse to align with reality, the friends embark upon a search for truth that will threaten their lives, and transform their understanding of each other–and the world itself–forever.
THOMAS WORLD
“Reading Thomas World is like gazing into the fragments of a shattered mirror and seeing someone else’s face reflected back. I couldn’t tear my eyes away, and after I put the book down, it stayed with me as a little voice in my head insisting: ‘None of this is real.’ Wildly hallucinatory, disturbingly schizoid, and bloody marvellous!” – Mark Hodden, Philip K. Dick Award-winning author of The Strange Affair of Spring Heeled Jack
“A crackling thriller brimming with both paranoia and philosophical conundrums.” – KA Bedford, author of Time Machines Repaired While-U-Wait
“Thomas World made me forget I was on an airplane. Cox communicates his plot beautifully interlacing heartwarming scenes with the bleakness of a man’s life coming down around him. To fans of Philip K. Dick, or films like Being John Malkovich and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, I think Thomas World will be right in the wheel house.” – Staffers Musings
Author Richard Cox (that’s me) is known for combining high concept ideas with adrenaline-fueled suspense, and he’s taken the concept to a mind-bending new level in the psychological thriller Thomas World (Night Shade books, September 6, 2011). Thomas World explores the mind of a man who suspects his life isn’t real, that everything he knows to be true might not be true at all. And once he begins to question the most essential facets of everyday reality, his life spins quickly out of control. On a journey to find answers to our most intringuing questions, Thomas turns reality inside out…not just for himself, but for everyone. Including you.
THE GOD PARTICLE
Barnes & Noble: “A speculative masterwork…Comparable to “consciousness- expanding” novels like James L. Halperin’s The First Immortal, Stephen Baxter’s Evolution, and Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Years of Rice and Salt, Cox’s ambitious second novel fearlessly explores the gray area between science and religion with both tact and insight. The God Particle is a cerebral page-turner of the highest order; readers will find it practically impossible to put this book down before getting to the last page.”
Kirkus Reviews: “Laden with eye-popping special effects, Cox’s follow-up to his 2004 debut (Rift) turns on speculative high-energy physics and the Higgs boson…A gripper of a yarn, swatting around really big ideas.”
Publishers Weekly: “A bizarre human experiment complicates a physicist’s quest for the Nobel Prize in Cox’s engaging, challenging second novel, a wryly comic thriller that incorporates several concepts from modern particle theory.”
Booklist: “This is an imaginative mix of mystery and fantasy.”
There is a divine spark within us all. In one man, that spark is about to explode. American businessman Steve Keeley is hurtled three stories to the cold cobblestone street in Zurich. In the days that follow, a doctor performs miraculous surgery on Keeley, who wakes up to find that everything about his world has changed. He seems to sense things before they happen, and he thinks he’s capable of feats that are clearly impossible. It’s a strange and compelling new world for him, one he quickly realizes is also incredibly dangerous. Meanwhile at a $12 billion facility in hardscrabble North Texas, a super collider lies two hundred feet beneath the Earth’s surface. Leading a team of scientists, Mike McNair, a brilliant physicist, works to uncover one of the universe’s greatest secrets-a theoretical particle that binds the universe together, often called The God Particle. When his efforts are undermined by the man who has poured his own vast fortune into the project, McNair begins to suspect that something in his research has gone very, very wrong. Now, these two men are about to come together, battling mysteries of science and of the soul-and venturing to a realm beyond reason, beyond faith, perhaps even beyond life and death.
RIFT
“…fast-paced narrative and a well-drawn protagonist. Cox has enough natural storytelling skill to keep his audience hooked.” — Publishers Weekly
“Cox’s first person, present-tense narrative gives Rift an immediacy and urgency that is the equivalent of a movie unspooling.” — Tulsa World “
“Cox has created some interesting characters, including the unlikely protagonist…” — Chicago Sun Times
“Richard Cox… is already making a name for himself in the writing world of science fiction and suspense.” — The Daily O’Collegian
“The answers [Cameron] finds to the doubts that motivate him are surprising and satisfying. The physics of transmitting matter is made believable. Packed with unexpected plot twists including murder, this book is impossible to put down.” — The Daily Oklahoman
In an age where reality and science fiction are colliding, Richard Cox’s extraordinary debut thriller takes its place as an all-too-believable novel of white-knuckle adventure. For when an ordinary man makes one great leap for mankind, he triggers a chain of events that endangers his life, fractures his certainty, and plunges everyone he knows into a place where nothing is what it seems. Cameron Fisher is bored. With his wife, Misty. With his job as an accountant at NeuroStor, the high-tech microchip firm. With everything about his life–until he is offered five million dollars to test a secret new technology that uses a wrinkle in quantum physics to transmit matter from one place to another. A company’s high-stakes brainchild is ready for its first human test. And Cameron Fisher is all too happy to oblige.
INTERNATION EDITIONS
Two of my novels have been translated into languages that aren’t English.
The God Particle was translated into Spanish as El Experimento Nobel and La Particula Divina, and into Dutch as Goddelijk experiment.
The Boys of Summer was translated into Italian as Un’ Estate da Ragazzi and The Boys of Summer in German.
I read each of these cover-to-cover and they are even more amazing than the versions I wrote in my native tongue.