AUS
NZ
UK
CA
USA
FRA
GER
ESP
ITA
NLD
PRT
SWE
GRC
IND
POL
BRA
ZAF
RUS
CHN
UAE
In his new book Staring Death In The Face: Searching For The Reaper Across Mexico he describes how he travelled to ancient temples, vibrant bustling markets, white sands, with weird tourists, and found a neon blur of excess searching for the Grim Reaper in Mexico during the famous Day Of The Dead Festival.
This comic and heartfelt narrative non-fiction work tells of nights at Mexico’s famous luchador wrestling, lost passports and drug busts, and a near-death experience almost drowning when swimming alone.
Danny was lost, nearly forty, without his partner, and surrounded by bin bags full of his clothes in his parents’ spare room: his thoughts turned to death.
If he’s got to start his life over, he thought, he may as well start at the end and work back. Find Death and become, if not friends, then at least on nodding terms. It's not a good plan, but it's the only one he’s got.
Danny decides to stalk Death to Mexico. Home of The Day Of The Dead Festival, Santa Muerte the patron saint of drug dealers and the dispossessed, and a bloody cartel drug war that's been going since the 80s. Death seems to be big over there.
Does he find his love of life now the love of his life has gone?
"Dumped and desperate, Danny Smith goes hunting for death to understand life. This is the heart of Gonzo given an electric shock; writing about the Grim Reaper has no right to be so vividly alive." Mic Wright (Writer and critic, aka @brokenbottleboy on Twitter)
Notes for Editors
Staring Death In The Face: Searching For The Reaper Across Mexico by Danny Smith is published by Paradise Circus on 6 October 2023 on ebook (£2.99) and in paperback (£8.99). http://paradisecircus.com/books/
Book Cover image: http://paradisecircus.com/files/2023/09/9781805170150.jpg
Other images available on request
For review copies please contact [email protected]
Danny Smith is available to interview and can speak on the Day of The Dead festival as well as other topics covered in the book.
PR contact: Jon Bounds [email protected] 0797478945
About the author
Danny Smith is a writer, degenerate, and malcontent. He has done lots of things for money: he has worked behind, and on the doors of, some of the roughest pubs in Birmingham, he sold CD-ROMs door-to-door in the suburbs of one of the most isolated cities in the world, he’s wrestled children of various sizes, taught kids from the ghettos of New Jersey how to shoot a bow, talked down the strung-out at various festivals, and protected people against nightmares.
Being a ferocious reader in his younger years Danny didn’t really start taking writing seriously until he was dropping out of his Fine Art degree in his 20s, since then he’s been published in various magazine including Vice, Area, and Fused, published three small press books and Pier Review, where he and his co-conspirators visited all 55 pleasure piers in England and Wales in two weeks, published by Summersdale.
Jon Bounds
Paradise Circus
email us here
