Discussion Literature / HellsChildren

I've been doing some digging on it. It was published by Power Publishing and originally released on the site Flipkart. However the page has since been deleted or removed. There's another unrelated book with the same title but it's sadly just a coincidence. I found it on Amazon India however it's not available to order, only having a cover image and no description. On the bright side it was listed as a paperback and Flipkart appears to sell physical books. I had assumed it was a digital only book that disappeared into the aether, but if a paperback exists then it may be out there somewhere. Nothing comes up on Amazon, Ebay, or Half Price Books so right now it seems to come down either to posting that you're looking for a copy or happening upon it in the wild. Assuming the paperbacks do exist, which I really hope they do.

A bit more info; for some reason it never occurred to me to use the Waybackmachine. The book was originally published in 2011, however all of the archived versions were from 2014. The YMMV page mentions a second printing, so I'd wager that happened in 2014 since that's when it got the most attention. For all the good it'll do, I did manage to get the ISBN numbers off the Amazon page. Here's the numbers as well as the Amazon.in page just incase they help in the search.

ISBN-10: 9381205086

ISBN-13: 978-9381205082

Amazon Link: www.amazon.in/Hells-Children-Andrew-Boland/dp/9381205086

Still no luck. It's nowhere on Bookfinder, but has a page on Google Books as well as Printsasia. Sadly the latter has no sales listings. I did an inquiry but they said it's no longer available. I'm a bit out of my element with this, previously my idea of hard to find was like "The Book of the War" by Lawrence Miles. Super expensive and you'll probably never find it on the shelf, but at least there are existent copies around. But at this point I can't see much to do besides posting that you're looking for it, wherever one would do that as if I knew I'd have already done it (probably a subreddit for it somewhere, once I have some extra money set aside I may go looking), or getting in touch with the publisher. Power Publishing has a facebook and I believe a website, as does Flipkart. Though as it's been removed from both I'm not sure how much they could help (for licensing reasons at the very least). But I feel like I've reached the stage where actually getting in touch with people is the only solution.

Being unable to find anything else on the book itself, I decided to dig into the cover art on Amazon. It gave off a vibe of being a stock image to me, and after messing around with a few reverse image searches I'm rather sure the image wasn't done for the book. Sadly I can't make out the artist's name as all of the images I've seen are low quality. However it was dated 2002. There are two copies of the pic on Deviantart. One says that the art is one of their OC's and the signature was their art teacher, for some reason. The other has no information. However I don't personally believe either is the original artist. I can't prove it and may be wrong, but just my instincts after having done this for a while. So what does this all mean... I have no idea. Maybe the author/publisher liked the pic and requested to use it, maybe they just grabbed the first cool pic off Google as is surprisingly common, especially at the time, maybe it was done for the book (unlikely with the 2002 date) and then got reposted later. I guess I was hoping I'd find the artist's name and that would lead to more info, but not much help.

Here's the best quality version of the image I could find along with the signature. In hopes someone else that's better at reading signatures may be able to figure out who it is.

i.imgur.com/1onQCWr.jpg

Edit: Yeah, I'm half asleep at the moment and mis-remembered the release date as 2004, but it was 2011. No chance of this being drawn for it.

I dived a bit deeper into Power Publishing. I gave them such a quick glance over before I wasn't even sure if they were still in business. I kind of assumed they were a small fly-by-night given the lack of information. But no, they're still in business and have a huge selection. Albeit with some unusual/mixed reviews on facebook. Anyway the book obviously isn't for sale on their site, however it is listed on their blog as the 19th book they published. Going through the archive of fiction, the earliest book listed is #15. There's probably earlier non-fiction (and I did scroll down every section just to make sure it wasn't stuck away somewhere), but it's not just a time thing. Either they delist totally out of print books, or it was removed intentionally. My working theory was that the author delisted it, since it's been 9 years and I've heard loads of stories of people unhappy with their old work and such. But again it's just a hunch. I'm basically just spinning my tires now, this was my last real idea besides just posting around appropriate sites asking if anyone has a copy they'll sell.

It seems like when I make one of these posts, I immediately have an idea I should have had in the first place. After looking through power publishing's naming conventions for urls, I did a wayback on what the book's page should have been, and struck gold. It was available in paperback and hardbound and was 160 pages long. It also did in-fact use the demon dog cover I linked. It also once had the official hellschildren.com domain, but as far as I can tell it was never finished. The archive for 2011 is "Coming soon" and it's a dead url in 2017, which is also when this listing is from. So the book was available at least 3 years ago. Anyway here's the archive url.

http://web.archive.org/web/20161029002945/https://www.power-publishers.com/product/hell-s-children

Since it's been over a year since my last post, I thought I'd give a situation, or rather lack-of-situation, report. I've been regularly checking all the aforementioned sites as well as setting up one of those notify-by-email things on ebay if any listings with keywords show up. And there hasn't even been a false positive, I genuinely forget what I even set up. So yeah, hoping isn't working. I've checked every local bookstore and thrift store around me rather often as well, but I don't expect it to be likely to show up. I have found some neat small press Cthulhu Mythos stuff before, but not reliably. So yeah, kind of been lazy with it so far since I simply couldn't find any "want to buy this book" reddits or anything. I did however make a "looking for" post on a book gifting/trade subreddit, but sadly didn't get any bites on that one either.

Guess it's time for another yearly check-in. This one will be short as literally nothing happened. None of my notifications bore fruit, and I haven't found it in any book stores or sites. I don't check as often as I used to, but at least once or twice a month. No current plans, but I do intend to ask around a bit and see if there's anything more proactive I can do. Still super weird to me that there are countless "Selling" places but no "Buying" ones.

Also the page image is still wrong, I might just fix it myself I guess, but I've never actually posted an image before.

In well-assorted book shops it's usually next to the Necronomicon.

Dam rite.