That Black Pig
Selected in The Year in (The Agency) Review 2025
In 2024, I published my first novel, That Black Pig.
Getting the book published took a while. I finished writing it in 2012 and I managed to bag myself an agent soon after (supposedly the hard part) but when she sent the manuscript out to publishers, she kept getting the same response. They liked the writing, but they couldn’t imagine where the book would sit on a shelf in Waterstone’s. It awkwardly straddled genres. A comedy that features extreme sexual violence. An unlikeable protagonist who demands the reader’s sympathy. A love story that you don’t necessarily want to succeed.
After receiving multiple knock-backs, my agent said I should write a second novel, and then try to get That Black Pig published off the back of it.
But, after all that rejection, I was done. I put That Black Pig in a drawer, and didn’t look at it again for ten years.
A decade is a funny thing. And when I came to reflect on the fact I’d written a 340-page novel that only a handful of people had read, I decided I owed it to myself to do something with it. So I started a Substack, where I serialised the novel in 3000-word chunks each week, editing and updating as I went. And, magically, the Substack took off. Rapidly gaining an audience, I formatted what I’d written into a proper book, and published it myself.
The response since has been fantastic.
Jim Seath, Executive Creative Director of White Rabbit Budapest, even selected That Black Pig as his book of 2025 in The Year in (The Agency) Review.
He said:
“It’s hilarious and beautifully disturbing, a story soaked in excess, murder, muggings, hemorrhoids, hemorrhoid cream, lust, and the strange moral fog of a well-established commercial photographer in London whose past includes porn. What I loved most is Ben Colley’s ability to properly carve out characters. They’re vivid, flawed, uncomfortable, human. In that sense, it reminded me, cautiously, and with a raised eyebrow, of Haruki Murakami. Less nuanced, far juicier. More punch-in-the-mouth than slow burn, but with the same confidence in letting characters exist rather than simply function. Characters are everything. Without them, there’s no tension, no truth, no reason to care. That Black Pig understands this instinctively. It’s a bloody good read.”
Who am I to argue with that?
If you’ve taken the time to read this far, you’d be daft not to get yourself a copy. And you can do that here.