First swing almost missed me. Fist came over his shoulder and I swayed back. Knuckles grazed the bridge of my nose and chin before digging into my chest. When I swayed again my foot didn't follow back the way I'd practiced. I went off-balance. Lost focus when the second punch came. In the opening passages of Summer of the Cicada, the boy Joseph Pullman describes, with chillingly passive detachment, a brutal and protracted beating at his father's hands. Joseph and his parents have just moved to Maritime, Massachusetts but the new start brings no change to Joe's life. The threat of violence in his father's house is unrelenting and his mother is slowly slipping away from reality. Things at home deteriorate and Joe faces trouble at school -but still the teachers, medical staff and neighbours fail to ask where he is getting all those scars and bruises. Joseph seeks refuge in the woods. He forms an uneasy friendship with the awkward Dean Gillespie and the boys occupy themselves burying animal corpses at the Killing Tree. One afternoon they set out to find the 'Grits', wandering gypsies and tramps rumoured to live in the woods. The next day a local boy is found tied to a tree, unconscious, the victim of a brutal attack. Meanwhile, Joseph's mother is gone and his father has retreated to his basement workshop with his bottles of whisky. This is the summer that the cicadas are due to come out of their seventeen-year hibernation and Joseph becomes convinced that their arrival will bring his salvation. Terrified by the noises coming from the basement and with nowhere to run, he sleeps with a knife under his pillow. When another local boy disappears, the residents of the town are finally forced to face the secrets of the Pullman's house. Will Napier's book evokes a boyhood summer that is both beautiful and terrifying and a hero whose voice is impossible to forget.
Will Napier was born in West Virginia to an American father and British mother. As a child he displayed a strong imagination. He remains easily distracted. The family moved several times before settling in Atlantic Beach, Florida in the late 80's. Each move brought new experiences that Will continues to feed off when producing fiction. Frequent trips to the United Kingdom gave him a taste of life outside of America and made for an easy transition when, in 1999, he returned to Scotland with his wife Elaine.
During his time in Scotland Will completed two post-graduate degrees at the University of Glasgow. The first, a Master's in Creative Writing, helped him get a start in his first novel Summer of the Cicada. A portion of his second novel, Without Warning, is included in the thesis for his PhD. The thesis, titled The Haunted House of Memory in the Fiction of Stephen King, was the first successful PhD granted by a UK university concerning the works of America's best-selling patriarch of horror.
Will returned to Florida in 2007 and now lives in Atlantic Beach, Florida with his wife and four children. His fiction has appeared in Nerve Magazine, The Sunday Herald Magazine, Confluence, Arena, The Independent and The Knuckle End: An Anthology of Emerging Scottish Literary Talent. His first novel Summer of the Cicada was released by Jonathan Cape Publishing, a division of Random House UK, in March 2005. His second novel Without Warning will be published by Jonathan Cape in February 2010.
He is at work on his third novel and is finishing a collection of short fiction. He teaches Creative Writing and Critical Theory.
