Now that it has been finalized, I can tell you all that my debut novel, In the Cage, has been optioned for film or TV. This has been in the works a little while, but a lot of these deals take some time to get done. The rights were sold to Jason Buxton and Festina Lente by Paige Sisley at Cooke McDermid, on behalf of Biblioasis. Buxton is developing the project for screen.

These film options don’t always lead to Winter’s Bone level magic, and that is why you need an agent to make sure that you’re selling rights to a place that actually intends to produce the film or show, but Jason has a great vision for the adaptation, and I think this has some legs. It’s still early days, but I’ll share news as it comes.

You can read the Book to Film release on this in Publisher’s Weekly right here. And you can find In the Cage here, if you haven’t checked it out already.

Literary critic Steven W. Beattie, regularly of the Quill & Quire, among other publications, has been doing a series called 31 Days of Stories for May, where he talks about a different work of short fiction every day. Turns out that he decided to cover Old Man Marchuk, the lead story from my 2015 collection, Debris.

Beattie had one of my favourite reviews of the collection back when it came out, and that showed up in The Globe & Mail. My editor, John Metcalf, was a fan of that review also. Mainly because Beattie really dug into the writing at a sentence level, and broke down the stylistic choices that were being made below the surface. He does that again here, but goes even deeper into this one specific story.

Anyways, you can check it out by clicking this line. And you can still find Debris, as well as my novel, In the Cage, online and at many actual real-life bookstores. Thanks to Beattie for continuing to champion the work. Cheers.

Hey everyone. I hope everything is going swimmingly. Here’s a review in a very good Canadian literary journal, Prairie Fire, about this novel I wrote called In the Cage. It’s been out there for about a month or so, but I’ve been waylaid by writing things and jurying writing things, so I’m getting to a number of book updates now.

“Hardcastle’s writing could be compared to that of Hemingway, Cormac McCarthy or Ken Bruen. His pared down sentences scrutinize a way of life that is rough and unrelenting… the author has found his own style, is in command of his pen and knows his subjects. He strips the facades from our comfortable lives and jolts us into the hard lane of life, and we soon acknowledge that living on the edge is difficult and downright heart-breaking.” – Mary Barnes – Prairie Fire

I sincerely thank the writer Mary Barnes for this one, and I really do appreciate her close reading of the novel. I didn’t think anymore reviews were coming in at this point, so I was pretty jacked up on mountain dew when I saw her take on the book. You can read the full thing by clicking this line.

Thanks a bunch, Prairie Fire, for putting this up. You are good folks. Cheers. KH