If the current list of bonus material for pre-ordering Robert Hood’s signed limited edition of Peripheral Visions (single cloth cover) is amazing, we decided to insanely add another!

Until stock is exhausted, all readers who pre-order the deluxe hardcover edition will receive a signed copy of Robert Hood’s novel Backstreets. This includes all pre-orders to date.

Backstreets is a 309-page novel by Robert Hood that was published by Hodder Headline in 1999. As indicated by its tagline – “It only takes a moment for the world to change utterly” – it chronicles how the 17-year-old protagonist deals with his grief when he wakes up after a car accident to find that he has been in a coma and that his best friend, who had been in the car when they crashed, is dead. Plagued by strange dreams and half-seen figures, he begins to believe that his friend isn’t dead at all, just lost. He begins searching the city, looking for his friend and for some sort of peace. Slowly he is drawn into the displaced world of the city’s backstreets, where he finds his life spiraling out of control.

Hood said about Backstreets: “To a large extent this novel was written in response to the accidental death of Luke Westbury, my stepson, on the 19th of December, 1997. It explores aspects of the grief felt by all of us who knew him. Though it uses some autobiographical elements (such as the Metallica concert and many aspects of Luke’s personality), it is, however, a work of fiction. For the publisher it was a naturalistic drama; I always saw it as a ghost story and that ambiguity infuses much of its approach and atmosphere.”

Backstreets was very successful at the time, provoking such comment as this from the magazine Viewpoint: “Confrontational and uncompromising, [Backstreets] deserves our attention and praise. There are some great writers on the Australian YA fiction scene and Robert Hood is one of them.” It is currently out of print.