FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
October 31, 2006

Zumaya Publications, LLC, announces the January, 2007 publication of DEATH GAME, a debut novel by author, Cheryl Swanson. Death Game will be published in trade paperback and e-book formats in the English language.

CANCER TREATMENT SPURS CREATIVITY AND DEBUT NOVEL

(October 31, 2006) - As Cheryl Swanson knows, things get trickier once death enters the picture. Here she was, in the midst of adopting a child from Guatemala, when a routine doctor visit spiraled into a series of tests. The upshot was a diagnosis of invasive breast cancer. “Make a will,” her breast surgeon urged, when asked for a prognosis.

And what about the pending adoption? That was covered in one word by Swanson’s Stanford Medical Center surgeon: “Fuggedaboutit”.

Instead, Swanson neatly transferred her feelings of being out of control into a suspense/thriller that seizes readers on the opening page and keeps them hooked through the final chapter. When Swanson’s heroine, Cooper O’Brien, is faced with a videotape showing her troubled kid-brother, Jimmie, shot another boy, she refuses to believe it. But her attempt to prove Jimmie innocent leads Cooper deeper and deeper into a fiendishly clever conspiracy. The devices used for murder are complex in Death Game, but not nearly as complex as the hopes, hurts, and fears that enmesh themselves in human hearts—as a plan for mass murder is being hatched and perpetrated.

Terror nips at Cooper’s heels all through Death Game, just as they did at Swanson’s during her cancer treatment. “Everything Cooper feels is a mirror reflection of what I was feeling,” Swanson said. “Cooper’s family, her life, even her mental balance, they are constantly under attack. Just like those of all individuals fighting against a deadly disease.”

Swanson said that cancer treatment inspired her to keep the action moving and the events harrowing. “Being in a chemo room is like being in the anteroom of a gas chamber,” Swanson said. “My challenge was to put that thoroughly awful thrill into words. And then, final step, create a much more entertaining situation than my own, in which those feelings might have happened in the first place.”

Death Game is chilling, but also darkly amusing. Peopled with dumpster diving teenagers wearing Enema of the State t-shirts, a man who conceals microphones in his Iron Maiden bra, and a nonchalant beauty who seduces men in the bathroom of Absinthe, a tony San Francisco restaurant, this is the ugly and wonderful landscape of life, San Francisco-style. As conjured up by Swanson, a ten year resident of the Bay Area, the city is vivid and off-kilter. “Something is terribly wrong in every household,” Swanson said, “from the Pacific Heights mansion of ship-owning magnate, Walter Ludlow, to Cooper’s “lean out your window and spit in your neighbor’s kitchen” row-house.

Swanson’s economical, straightforward prose provides a contrast to her characters’ unsettling behavior. She summarizes in a couple of unpretentious paragraphs her heroine debating having sex with her faithless husband:

I wanted a moral victory, wanted to play the outraged female and fling myself away, but there was no embarrassment here, no awkwardness. We knew this part of each other too well. The door was shut and locked, the clothes moved out of the way effortlessly—no tugging, no rushing. He put his lips on mine again, opened them, and I had a decision to make.
He knew the battle I was having with myself, and he pulled away for a second. Measured me out one ironical wiggle of his eyebrows, one insulting half-smile.
“So, what about it, tiger? You want me to stop? Just say the word. Just tell me to stop.”
I opened my mouth to tell him. This was Loony Tunes. This made no kind of sense at all.
“Well?” he asked, still holding himself back. Still smiling.
“Oh, hell,” I said. “For once in your life, just shut up.”

Swanson makes you care deeply about Jimmie and, especially, Cooper, who leads from her heart. A gifted special effects artist, when Cooper leaves the movie business to go back to a man who does not deserve her, she is chided by her good friend, Yoshi:

Yoshi was working on a sci-fi flick. “The primary effect is taking buckets of dirt and throwing them across the screen,” he said. “The director has a real hard-on for dirt. And the cinematographer—if he can even get a job afterwards I’ll eat my own dick.”
“You miss me,” I said.
“You deserved to have your skull cracked, Cooper,” he said. “Why don’t you just hang a sign around your neck—Kick me around, I’m too stupid to get a divorce. Why’d you go back to that jerk?”

However exasperating Cooper is, she’s also witty. Here she is talking to the bad guys.

“What big heroes you all are,” I said to him, unable to contain myself any longer. “You kill women and teenage boys. What’s next? Terminal cancer victims and six-month-old babies?”

Or… once again to the bad guys, after she’s been trussed up and taken on a two hour ride in the back of a van:

“I enjoyed the ride up here,” I said. “But the movie stank.”

You’ll enjoy the ride as well. Death Game is a one-sitting read where the thrill is non-stop.

Cheryl Swanson lives with her adopted daughter from Guatemala and her husband in Kauai. Her first novel, Death Match, will be published by Zumaya Publications, LLC in January 2007 and will be available from Amazon and most local bookstores. Her website is www.cherylswanson.net. She can be reached at: cherylaswanson@gmail.com