Twitchers

When Richard's campaign for dog food is trolled with hostile memes, he wants to celebrate. For three months, the London adman's been pushing increasingly risky themes in an effort to get sacked without losing his career-minded girlfriend. He's at the mercy of his 'piranhas', OCD symptoms born of an overbearing father. He swallows too much, blinks too much, is obsessed with his heart rate and sometimes panics during sex. Dumped anyway, Richard retreats home to the Adelaide where a shrewd agency director wants his ideas to exploit social media outrage. A noisy bird wakes him every morning, smoke fills the sky from a series of violent pyromaniac acts. His friends blame the Blackwood Clown, a hermit artist who's been screaming at bushwalkers. Richard once burnt the clown's paintings in a bungled prank that landed him an arson conviction and, apparently, the clown wants revenge. Constable Sniles, an angry exile, seeks professional redemption by blaming Richard. He has an alibi in a former lover, Ashleigh, but the more time they spend together, the deadlier the fires become, igniting an inferno so fierce it threatens to consume the entire district and incinerate whatever's left of Richard's mind.

Malcolm Sutton is an award-winning journalist whose work for the ABC, The Guardian Australia and Fairfax Media has been published nationwide and internationally.

He lives in South Australia where he performs as a musician and writes for a fringe theatre company that has produced works in London and Adelaide. Twitchers is his first published novel.

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