It’s been a long time coming — three years, in fact — but my first novel under the byline of Thomas Hewitt has hit virtual shelves. It’s called Hawg, and it’s a story in the tradition of Razorback (1984) and Boar (2017), about a giant, killer pig. Get your giggles out now, because it’s a harrowing ride full of tension, violence and gore.
The concept for Hawg came to me around 2006, when I first heard of the monstrous feral pig they called Hogzilla. It occurred to me that if there was one real-life hog of that size, there were bound to be others, and the fiction of Peter Brennan’s Razorback and Kenneth Cook’s Pig suddenly was a lot less unlikely.
I decided to write Hawg as a screenplay, but that didn’t come to pass. I’m not a screenwriter, though I do love movies and moviemaking. My form is prose, and I guess that’s okay.
Anyway, Hawg fizzled out, then sat in my unused idea file for a number of years until the “30-50 feral hogs” meme struck. It reminded me that, yes, wild pigs are a serious danger to crops, livestock and even people. And what greater danger could there be than a hog the size of a rhino? A hawg, one might say.
Writing the book was easy. Finding it a home wasn’t. My then-publishers wanted no horror, and because of exclusivity agreements I couldn’t release it on my own. But times change, and the hawg is here.