Sascha Stronach: The Dawnhounds
“A strange and wondrous re-imagining of noir that takes its cues from biopunk and SE Asian mythos to create something wholly different.” —Rebecca Roanhorse, author
In The Dawnhounds by Sascha Stronach, Gideon the Ninth meets Black Sun in this queer, Māori-inspired debut fantasy about a police officer who is murdered, brought back to life with a mysterious new power, and tasked with protecting her city from an insidious evil threatening to destroy it.
The port city of Hainak is alive: its buildings, its fashion, even its weapons. But, after a devastating war and a sweeping biotech revolution, all its inhabitants want is peace, no one more so than Yat Jyn-Hok a reformed-thief-turned-cop who patrols the streets at night.
Yat has recently been demoted on the force due to “lifestyle choices” after being caught at a gay club. She’s barely holding it together, haunted by memories of a lover who vanished and voices that float in and out of her head like radio signals.
When she stumbles across a dead body on her patrol, two fellow officers gruesomely murder her and dump her into the harbor. Unfortunately for them, she wakes up.
Resurrected by an ancient power, she finds herself with the new ability to manipulate life force. Quickly falling in with the pirate crew who has found her, she must race against time to stop a plague from being unleashed by the evil that has taken root in Hainak.
The Dawnhounds
(The Endsong Book 1)
Sascha Stronach
Gallery / Saga Press
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About the Author
Sascha Stronach is a Maori author from the Kai Tahu iwi and Kati Huirapa Runaka Ki Puketeraki hapu. He is based in Wellington, New Zealand, and has also spent time in Malaysia, Indonesia, and Singapore, which have all inspired parts of the fictional worlds he creates. A former tech writer, he first broke out into speculative fiction by experimenting with the short form. The Dawnhounds, his debut novel, won the Sir Julius Vogel Award at Worldcon 78.
“There’s often this assumption that horror is cheap, that it’s the exclusive domain of hack authors putting out airport schlock,” the author told Ginger Nuts of Horror. “We often tack it on as an afterthought: ‘Science Fiction and Fantasy, oh and horror can come, too.’ I dislike the term ‘elevated horror’ because it comes with this assumption built in: oh well I know you don’t like horror, but The Babadook is different.
“My personal response has always been that I just don’t care. I feel like the distinction between ‘high’ and ‘low’ art is fundamentally classist; I don’t think a book goes from ‘art’ to ‘not art’ if you put a zombie in it, y’know, it’s what you do with that zombie. It’s a person infected with a disease that forces people around them to make complex moral and ethical decisions—if you can’t see a way to make a statement with that I don’t know what to tell you.
“Maybe it’s coming from SF/F, which has been dealing with this same shit since forever (see: ‘Never Let Me Go cannot be science fiction, because the prose is good, that’s what makes it literary fiction’) but I say just write the words and let your audience find you. The baggage of being Low Art is just weighing you down, so why not just throw it out? It never meant much.”
