Well, Australia, at long long last. It's here. Last Wednesday, Scarecrow hit the shelves of bookstores across the country. The response (already) has been overwhelming, with one chain reporting that they sold 1,000 copies of the book in the first two days.

And so, in celebration of the Australian release of my new book, I thought I'd devote this month's Thoughts section to Scarecrow -- including a review of the book by me!

Hey! It's my site. If I want to review my own book, that's my choice! (Maybe if I write a good enough review they can put a quote on the cover of the paperback: "The best book I've ever read!" - Matthew Reilly). Okay then, how about this: as a DVD fan, let's call it a "commentary". And don't worry, there are NO SPOILERS HERE.

Scarecrow is my fifth novel, and I'm hoping that it's a case of: just when you thought you'd figured me out, I spring some huge surprises on you. It is designed to be sensory overload in a book -- an absolute bombardment of information, action, emotion and narrative speed. It's my hope that when people put it down, they are totally exhausted.

The new book sees the hero of Ice Station and Area 7, Captain Shane "Scarecrow" Schofield placed on a list of 15 of the best warriors in the world -- commandos, terrorists, spies -- who must all be dead by 12 noon. The price on each of their heads: $20 million. And that's just the first three pages! As such, Schofield begins the book on the hop, chased by ruthless international bounty hunters. Who wants him dead? And why? These are the questions he'll have to answer, while he's running for his life.

I wanted to write a book that was completely out of control, pace-wise. I didn't want to have 20 pages of set-up. I wanted readers to pick up Scarecrow and feel as if they are intruding upon a story that had already started. Like Schofield, they have to catch up and figure out what's happening.

I think Scarecrow is indeed the "hardest" of all my books. It's certainly more violent than the others -- but I hope the hardness comes from something else. When I wrote it, I wanted it to be totally uncompromising. No character is ever safe in a Matthew Reilly book, not even the hero, and this is certainly true in Scarecrow. But again, just when readers think they have figured me out, I hope I surprise them -- just as Scarecrow contains some of the most confronting scenes I have ever written, it also contains what I consider to be the very best scene I have ever written, a scene involving Schofield and Mother on a rainswept clifftop.

But the book is also "hard" because it takes place in a hard world. Scarecrow is my first book after September 11, and I do believe that our world has changed since that terrible day. A journalist in England asked me recently if I was comfortable writing about 9/11 and the state of the world after it, and I replied by saying that I'd feel worse if I didn't mention 9/11. As a thriller writer, I interpret the world as it is. And I'm certainly not going to stick my head in the sand and imagine that events like 9/11 and the Bali bombings and the recent invasion of Iraq didn't happen. I set my books in the real world, and that, sadly, is now a world that includes in its history the events of September 11, 2001.

As an interesting aside, I wrote Scarecrow throughout 2002, before the "coalition of the willing" went into Iraq this year. Fortunately, before the manuscript for Scarecrow went to the printers, I was able to insert a few paragraphs into it about the 2003 Iraq War, thus keeping Scarecrow completely up to the minute.

I believe that Scarecrow is different to my other novels. It is a quantum leap upward in terms of pace and speed. I analysed my writing in my previous books, and worked on some techniques for speeding up the pace of my storytelling (in short: no adverbs, fewer adjectives, smoother sentence flow). Why? Because I think audiences (you!) are getting more and more sophisticated. Readers can grasp plot-points very quickly now, so I write with that in mind. I hurl information at you the reader, and you absorb it and say "Yep, got that, let's move on."

I firmly believe that as audiences evolve, it is the writer's duty to evolve with them -- in fact, it's more than a duty, it's a survival technique. If authors don't keep up with readers, then readers will find other authors (or movies or TV or computer games) that do satisfy them.

In the end, I hope you all enjoy Scarecrow. I don't think anyone's ever read a book like it.