Ginger Nuts of Horror in conjunction with St Martin's press are giving you the chance to win a copy of Glimpse the latest novel from Jonathan Maberry.  

A chilling thriller that explores what happens when reality and nightmares converge, and how far one will go to protect the innocent when their own brain is a threat.

From New York Times bestselling author Jonathan Maberry comes a novel that puts a bold new spin on the supernatural thriller.

Rain Thomas is a mess. Seven years an addict and three difficult years clean. Racked by guilt for the baby she gave up for adoption when she was sixteen. Still grieving for the boy's father who died in Iraq. Alone, discarded by her family, with only the damaged members of her narcotics anonymous meetings as friends. Them, and the voices in her head.

One morning, on the way to a much-needed job interview, she borrows reading glasses to review her resume. There is a small crack in one lens and through that damaged slice of glass she sees a young boy go running down the aisle of the subway train. Is he screaming with laughter or just screaming? When she tries to find the boy, he's gone and no one has seen him.

The day spins out of control. Rain loses whole chunks of time. She has no idea where her days went. The voices she hears are telling her horrible things. And even stranger things are happening. Unsure whether she is going insane, Rain sets out to find answers to long buried questions about an earlier life she has avoided for years--in what may be the most dangerous collision of all, that between reality and nightmare.

How far will one person go to save someone they love?
​
Read on at your own peril...

 My childhood fear is simply, of home. It’s an odd one, I’ll grant you.

Home is meant to be the place we go to in order to feel safe. To feel ‘at home’ somewhere is a synonym for feeling secure, rested, at ease. But not for me.

I grew up in an old house on the edge of bogland, a beautiful and isolated place. All around me were fields, trees, weeping willows. It was too far to walk anywhere, so once you were there, there was no means of escape. It was fine during the day, especially if it was summer and I could roam around, or even in winter if I had a book to escape into. But at night the real terrors came.

I was a very anxious child. And a morbid one. I suffered from years of vivid, technicolour nightmares. I dreamt of funerals, of being chased by shadowy figures, of scenes of blood and torture from local stained glass windows. It didn’t help that I knew our house was over two hundred and fifty years old and built on an old graveyard. It didn’t help that there was still the custom of waking the dead in their homes, meaning that I saw my first dead body in a parlour before the age of ten. It didn’t help that at home folklore was taken as seriously as Catholicism. My grandmother would talk composedly of hearing the banshee. My aunt had seen a ghost, not once, but several times.

And I think you know, it might be an Irish thing, that acute anxiety that surrounds home. For nearly two hundred years, home was a place of dispossession, eviction, transience. Today Irish people are obsessed with owning homes, a legacy of colonial centuries where security of tenure was impossible. We see this reflected in contemporary Irish creative work, the sinister homes of Patrick McCabe’s novels, the reimagined, disturbing sculptures of Alice Maher and Dorothy Cross. We see it in our customs and traditions that survive, houses laden with a mix of pagan and Catholic icons from horseshoes to St. Benedict medals to Sacred Heart images to ward off evil, fire, transgression. In folklore, home is ultimately a vulnerable place, open to attack; a notion that still survives strongly.

And so, night after night, I learned the painful truth, that home could be a place where you were alone with your greatest fears. During the endless nights I would sit up, watching the old wardrobe in my room, which was inclined to creak open in a manner both sudden and alarming. What I didn’t realise then is that while the home forms our first experience of a safety perimeter it’s also the space within which we have our earliest experiences of discomfort, fear, anger and discord. During the day the home perimeter was fixed, but at night the spaces within it were more difficult to define. Every night as the light dimmed, home changed from familiar to unfamiliar; rooms seemed larger and darker, corridors were endless. And this is where my anxiety bloomed.

Instead of sleeping I’d read. Firstly, I read fairytales, but they didn’t help. In these cautionary tales children are stolen, cursed, betrayed by their families. That was too close to home. So I started reading horror. My parents were exasperated, pointing out over and over that what I read was giving me nightmares. I knew better. I knew that while ‘The Cask of Amontillado’ terrified me, it was an external locus of terror. I fell in love with the dreamy, escapist aesthetic of horror. It had no bearing on my real life; its fears were confined to the covers of my books. The real terrors – that my father would crash the car, that the house would catch on fire, that I’d see a ghost sitting in the corner of my room – these were the ones that couldn’t be appeased.

Years later, I was to discover books that mapped this domestic Gothic world for me; Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House, Serena Mackesy’s Hold My Hand, Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca. They all spoke to me, with their haunted interiors, their protagonists plagued by strange dreams, odd noises, and manifestations that couldn’t be explained.

Looking back, I feel a genuine stir of compassion. I could cry for that anxious child I was; haunted by fears, afraid of ghosts, never at home, perpetually ill-at-ease. But I realise now that this discomfort fuels my writing. As one of my favourite artists, Aideen Barry puts it: ‘I think one of the things that enables me to make work, is that I am never at ease, I never feel I am at home and I am rarely comfortable where I am. This causes me to constantly question why that is, why do I not belong and how can I address these feelings’ (Gilsdorf 2011: 1). And that, at least partly, is what my reissued collection, The Unheimlich Manoeuvre, is about. It’s also, of course, based on Freud’s essay, The Uncanny, of 1919, where Freud puts the idea of the haunted house at the centre of the concept of the uncanny, homes haunted not only by spectres, but memories, secrets and anxieties that recur repeatedly.

For me this fear of home, this fear set in home, has never really gone away. The most unsettling things I can imagine aren’t improbable and far away. They’re not set in space, nor in ancient history. They’re right here, at home.

The sound that might be a footstep outside my bedroom door. The strange creaks of subsidence in the middle of the night. The possibility that someone – or something – might be here.

 
The Folded Land is the second book of the Relics trilogy.  Relics was book one, and next year's The Edge will be book three. This makes The Folded Land, undeniably and irrefutably by all laws of maths and reason, book two.  And that's fine.
 
But it's also the middle book of the trilogy, and any writer will tell you that a middle book is always a tough one.  Book one has established the world and rules, the characters and their arcs, and it has hopefully left readers wanting more.  Book three will bring the story to a satisfying conclusion, giving characters the resolutions they demand and deserve to end the story. 
 
Book two needs to do a lot more than just bridge the gap. 
 
I've read trilogies where the second book feels something like a pause, or which often expands and pads out a story where no real expansions and padding is needed.  I never wanted The Folded Land to feel like that.  In my head, these three books have always been standalone adventures in a wider world.  There's a background story arc of course, but it's the spine upon which the more diverse stories are expanded and hung, a connecting thread that I hope will offer as much enjoyment as the individual books and their tales.
 
I thought a lot about The Folded Land before starting it.  To begin with, I knew it was going to be set somewhere other than London (the reasoning behind the USA setting is subject of another blog post).  That in itself would make it distinctive, because I think Relics is a very 'London' novel.  I also knew that as well as characters familiar from Relics––Angela and Vince, Lilou and Mallian, and of course Fat Frederick Meloy––I needed to introduce new characters and, in some ways, make it as much their story as well. 
 
I think that this introduction of new point of view characters give The Folded Land a very fresh feel.  We're still following the story of the amazing Kin and their possible exposure to the wider world, but in doing so from fresh eyes (a new character), there's still that sense of wonder which I think gave Relics such a powerful feel and atmosphere.  Sammi was a fun character to write, especially because of her link to a character readers will recognise from the first book. 
 
And Gregor is terrific fun.  I love writing bad guys, and Gregor is one of the baddest. 
 
So, The Folded Land is the Difficult Middle Book, but one in which I've done my best to incorporate much of a standalone story, an adventure that can be told and enjoyed independently of Relics and forthcoming third book The Edge.  The bigger, wider world is still there, and The Folded Land is the solid core of the story.  Without everything that happens in this book, the events of The Edge––still to be written, but taking a very definite shape in my head––would be very different.
 
The Folded Land awaits you.  Step inside.

As for me - I had a blast. Again.
 
I wasn’t expecting to, to be honest. I can be quite militant about stories ending at natural break points. I was a big Buffy fan back in the day, but I’ve only seen seasons 6 and 7 once, and looking back, I wish that I hadn’t bothered - the finale of Season 5 was written as the show closer, and it works perfectly as that. And my position on RoboCop sequels is even more militant. Given that, and my feelings about the ending of The Rising, I shared Keene’s antipathy about returning to these characters. But that feeling melted away almost instantly once I started turning the pages.
 
You can almost feel Keene’s enthusiasm catch on the page, as the book unfolds. The action in the first third of the book is relentless, as Frankie, Martin, Jim and Danny try, with the help of neighbour Don, to escape from the trap they’ve backed themselves into. Set piece flows into set piece, with the same cinematic qualities and flare of the last third of The Rising, albeit on a smaller scale - though interestingly, despite that, the stakes feel higher, as I’d come to really care about these characters by this point.
 
A particular highlight for me was the moment the cast have to cross to the attic window of the neighbour’s house across a ladder, while the zombies (some of them armed, remember) swarm below.
 
It’s a classic movie scene, and Keene put me right there, heart in mouth, as the characters made their way across - and when Danny made the mistake of looking down, and froze at the halfway mark, I was far too caught up in the sweaty tension of the moment to be worried about the relatively predictable nature of the event.
 
Sidebar: I’m only three books in (including Clickers), but one thing I’m already discovering; for me, as a reader, I’m far less bothered by cliche than I might have supposed. Because the freeze-halfway-across thing is an absolute staple of pulp storytelling, be it action or horror. What I’m learning is simply this; that doesn't bother me, as long as the story is well told and I believe in and care about the characters. Because an eight year old freezing in that moment of existential dread may be predictable, and dramatically useful, but it’s also, well, realistic. Not only did the moment not bother me, I was totally caught up in it, freaking out right along with Jim, and hoping like hell Danny wasn’t going to end up in that pool. It’s only now, a month or so later as I sit to write about the experience, that it’s occured to me that this was an absolute stock horror/action moment.
 
There’s probably a lesson about storytelling in there somewhere.
 
Anyway.
 
In the event, it’s Frankie that ends up taking the unscheduled high dive, and I gotta tell you, I was pissed about that. Frankie became one of my favourite fictional characters somewhere between her escape from the Zoo and her cold turkey session in the sewers - but at the same time, this is my second Brina Keene novel, and I know damn well he could quite happily kill her off. It’s an enormous strength of the storytelling, as I think back on the novel, actually - in The Rising Keene makes it clear that no-one is safe, and it gives sustained action sequences like this one a considerable extra layer of bite (pun intended).
 
It’s also a brilliant bit of misdirection, as Frankie takes injury after injury, seemingly fatally wounded… and then it’s Martin who is killed as the car crashes. The moment worked well for me, underlining the peril the group were facing, and of course Jim having to smash the head of his friend in with a rock as he turns is a reminder of the merciless nature of The Rising’s world.
 
I really cannot emphasise enough how ferocious the pacing is in this sequence, especially following the car crash. The peril is enormous and sustained, for a second almost convincing me that Danny was going to get ripped apart, and Frankie’s back-from-the-dead intervention was a pure punch-the-air moment (did I mention she’s my favourite yet?) The desperate scramble to the parking garage, the last minute rooftop rescue… It’s just pure adrenaline, and by the time the characters were pulled aboard the chopper, I was almost as out of breath as they were.
 
Two other narrative strands also develop as this sequence unfolds. The first is the reintroduction of Ob, a leader of the Sissquim, who featured prominently in The Rising. His initial sequence I wasn’t wild about - his delivery of a gloating monologue to a captive prisoner, explaining more about the Sissquim and their background, felt like a clumsy info dump to me - especially with Ob having become a POV character. I’d have prefered to learn his background more organically, perhaps as internal dialogue as he planned his next move. It’s particularly annoying because the mythos itself is such an interesting one, and I wished there had been a more elegant way to introduce it.
 
That said, the loss of Ob’s body, and his subsequent locating of a new host (during which we learn how that process works, and Ob gets an update on the global progress of the Sissquim) worked well for me, and his subsequent plans to complete the purge of New York City felt appropriately sinister - and, of course, neatly and plausibly put him back on a collision course with Jim and his people.
 
And then there’s the small matter of Ramsey Towers.
 
Again, in the intro to the book, Keene discusses the similarity between his setting of Ramsey Towers and the plot of Romeo’s Land of the Dead. And his basic explanation is, hey, it was 2005 - with Bush starting his second term, the founding of the DHS and the Patriot act, megalomaniac American despots (albeit paternalistic ones), with dead eyed second-in-commands who wielded most of the real power and smarts were very much the order of the day.
 
But I have to say, reading this in 2017, having a eponymous tower in New York, owned by a billionaire with a tendicy to masterbate while staring out of his top floor office window at the city below, utterly delusional and convinced of his own brilliance, even as the entire world crumbles around him… was it Twain who said ‘history may not repeat, but it does rhyme’? Because, damn.
 
Anyhow, leaving aside the genuinely unsettling effect of reading a book written in 2005 that nonetheless seems to be a dead-on satire of the 45 President of the USA and his isolationist fantasies, there’s so much to enjoy in the setup. The legend of the ‘impenetrable’ tower, at least according to its owner (even as his number 2 is more clear eyed) serves as a nice thematic microcosm for the mythos as a whole - a small, fragile chink of light and warmth we call society, surrounded by a consuming darkness that could sweep it all away at any moment (and also, the meaning of The Tower as a symbol in tarot) - but also works well on its own terms. The idea that someone post 9/11 would want to build a siege-and-bomb-proof tower in Manhattan rings plausible (especially a billionaire real estate developer - would he’d gotten the idea before forming an exploratory committee, and yeah, okay, I’ll stop now). The power dynamic between delusional Ramsey and hyper competent Bates is quickly established, as is the atmosphere of a fragile, frighteningly vulnerable order barely holding together.
 
Similarly, seeing Jim and the gang explore the community that’s rescued them, Jim in particular feeling his way around the edges of it, trying without being impolite to see what’s really going on, is well told, and the Jim/Danny relationship is just heartbreakingly well drawn. The situation is a parenting nightmare, and I found it affecting to see Jim trying to negotiate the impossible task of helping his son prepare for life in this new world, while still needing him to be a kid, as much as possible. It really is possible to see the outline of the Carl and Rick relationship from The Walking Dead being sketched out here, albeit in a more compressed form, and the whole sequence rings painfully true.
 
As with the climax to The Rising, I was really impressed by how well the final third of the novel flowed. Keene deftly introduces elements - the truly twisted doctor and his captive zombie, the increasing morale problems with the guards, Ob’s gathering of his forces and planning, and the power struggle at the very top between Ramsey and Bates - and weaves them together deftly, switching between groups to heighten the sense of dread and impending violence. It’s really skillful storytelling, particularly when you consider it was for the most part being discovered on the page.
 
And when the dam bursts, the onslaught is every bit the equal of the previous finale - action packed, relentless, and brutal. Again, Keene’s flair for cinematic action is put to great effect, relentlessly chewing through characters (often literally) as the dwindling band of survivors makes a last desperate bid to escape via the sewers. Again, I’m reminded what I love most about good pulp entertainment - this commitment to utterly command my attention as a reader, through sheer force of incident, character, action - and what a joy it is to read, done well.
 
The final confrontation with Jim and Ob is suitably high stakes, and Jim’s sacrifice to save his son feels earned, especially knowing Danny will have Frankie to protect him. That said, I did find the coda ending hard to take. I can’t argue with it in narrative terms - it’s the right, probably the only real ending the story can have, and at least Danny and Frankie get to go out relatively quick - but it still landed like a suckerpunch in the moment. It’s early days, but it feels like with both this book and The Rising, there’s a nihilism at the core of Keene’s work - a notion, crudely, that we’re all fucked, and that our journey to our final destination is unlikely to be peaceful or pleasant.
 
That makes for uncomfortable reading, at times. But it also makes for great horror. And City of the Dead is another great pulp action horror novel - brimming with thrills and spills, blood and guts - and also a raw humanity, real characters in impossibly bleak circumstances, pushed beyond any reasonable limit and making the best choices they can.
 
It’s pulp, sure - in the best possible meaning of the term. But it’s also got a lot of heart, and so far, that’s what elevates Keenes work, for me.
 
I look forward to seeing if that theme continues in Terminal.
 
KP
21/12/17

‘The Hollow Tree’ is a ghost story heavily inspired by an unsolved wartime murder mystery local to me – that of Bella in the Wych Elm.

On the 18th of April 1943, four lads poaching in Hagley Wood south of Birmingham found the skeletal remains of a woman hidden in the hollow trunk of an ancient elm tree. The resulting police investigation created more questions than it answered, especially when graffiti appeared in Birmingham which read ‘Who put Bella down the Wych Elm?’ and she changed from being an anonymous corpse into a woman with a name, and hence a family and identity. That identity has never been established – let alone that of her killer or killers – a situation not helped by the loss of her remains during the War. This in turn created fertile ground for several competing narratives about Bella’s life and fate.

In some she is a British double agent – a cabaret-singer-turned-spy betrayed by her wartime contacts and murdered to stop her revealing their secrets, her remains having been destroyed by MI5. In others she is a prostitute, killed by a ‘client’. The discovery of bones from one of her hands in nearby leaf-litter was clear evidence of gypsy witchcraft, proof that she had been sacrificed and her hand severed in an attempt to create a ‘hand of glory’. All of this is despite the fact that there is no evidence of gypsies or witches ever being active in the area, and the one cabaret-singer who might have fitted her description was still recording songs several years after Bella’s body was found. Given the chaos of wartime, the police did their best to find any ‘Bellas’, or variations on that name, who had been reported missing, but came up with nothing. To this day Bella’s death remains unexplained. The case is closed, officially unsolved.

The danger in writing her story was, as I saw it, of falling into the trap of trying to uncover the ‘truth’ of her death and end up with a historical murder-mystery. If that’s what you’re interested in there are any number of excellent books on the subject, picking apart the evidence for and against the various theories. Steve Punt made a particularly thorough documentary for Radio 4, and a recent independently produced short film by Thomas Lee Rutter is well worth a watch. My reason for playing fast and loose with the historical details was in an attempt to get at something deeper than a simple ‘solution’ to the mystery – something about the different people that each of us is in life and what that might mean for us in the afterlife, if there is one.

So Bella became Mary – or Marys, to be pedantic. Like most things which seemed like a good idea at the time, the central conceit of the story was straightforward enough: what if you came back from the dead but the only way you knew who you were was from the stories that the living told about you? What if those stories conflicted with each other? And what if Death came after you to take you back – except that Death didn’t know which ‘you’ it wanted?

Bella’s elm became Mary’s oak, and Hagley Wood became the Lickey Hills, near my home. The original elm was destroyed long ago and only a few people know exactly where it stood. In my story the place where the ‘Mary Oak’ once stood is better known, and serves as a kind of shrine, with the trees around the clearing decorated with ribbons, rags and trinkets. There is no rag tree in the Lickeys – at least not to my knowledge – but there is a clootie well a few miles away in St Kenelm’s pass which runs between the Clent Hills. Folkore has it that Kenelm, a Mercian prince, was murdered by an ambitious relative and his body hidden there, and that when it was discovered and disinterred a fresh-water spring burst out of his grave. That spring is now in the grounds of St Kenelm’s church, and the trees around it are decorated with ribbons, shoelaces and scraps of paper.
Scratch the ground pretty much anywhere and you’ll find the bodies of old legends, and sometimes the new myths born from their bones.

The Bella graffiti also appeared on the base of a large obelisk in a field near the woods where her remains were found. The monument was erected in the 1700s by the Sir Thomas Lyttleton, owner of the Hagley Hall Park, as part of the then-fashionable vogue for manufacturing picturesque landscapes. The lettering is refreshed from time to time, always anonymously, and is something of a macabre navigation point if you’re rambling the fields around Hagley. There is also a much larger obelisk in the Lickeys – this one raised in the 1800s to the memory of the 6th Earl of Plymouth who went by the improbable-sounding name of Other Archer Windsor, which suited as a replacement for the purposes of the story. This is the landscape where a certain Mr Tolkien lived for part of his childhood and used to ramble around, making up stories of hobbits and orcs and walking trees. It has nothing to do with ‘The Hollow Tree’ except that I think sometimes I’m being stalked by coincidences.
​
‘The Hollow Tree’ is published by Titan Books and released on March 13th. Please buy a copy and say nice things about it.

For the most part, I don't waste time or energy concerning myself with it any longer; neither the publications themselves nor the readership that are willing to bloat on their poison are worth the expenditure.
 
However, a recent effort by The Sun I have to applaud, in that it succeeded in making my jaw hit the floor in utter, appalled incredulity:
 
Initially, I laughed, presuming, naturally enough, that the article was one of the many parodies or satire pieces at The Sun's expense, poking fun at how little regard it has for its reader's intelligence and critical capacities.
 
However, laughter soon gave way to a kind of polluted awe upon researching the article and finding it not to be satire or parody (evidence, in fact, that such things are impossible when it comes to the likes of this foetid rag), but a genuine article. 
 
I'm refering, of course, to the recent idiocy penned by self-proclaimed “journalists” (yes, it actually took two people to write something that has less meaning, sincerity and genuine grasp of its own subject matter than what I scrape out of the cat's litter box every morning), Gary O'Shea and Thea Jacobs (links below) provocatively entitled Flakensteins. ​

​This is not some liberal, PC contrivance, some post-modern, political reading designed to push any kind of agenda: this is overt within the text, for anyone that has bothered to actually read it: 

The entire purpose of the text is an examination of what it means to be human, to be sentient, to have a soul and animus and life; the “monster” is the perfect vessel for those considerations, and, as those of us who have read the fucking book know, this is the entire point: he is not some lurching, grunting, mindlessly violent entity; he is  a victim, of his creator, who had no right to impose unwanted and cruel consciousness on him, then to reject him for his imperfections: a sublimely complex exmaination of the fundamental evils that are part and parcel of conscious being; of the tensions that exist between creators and their creations, between parents and children, between God and man, between science and metaphysics... ​

“Even broken in spirit as he is, no one can feel more deeply than he does the beauties of nature. The starry sky, the sea, and every sight afforded by these wonderful regions, seems still to have the power of elevating his soul from earth. Such a man has a double existence: he may suffer misery, and be overwhelmed by disappointments; yet, when he has retired into himself, he will be like a celestial spirit that has a halo around him, within whose circle no grief or folly ventures.”

Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus. Mary Shelley.

But, of course, the “journalists” are aware of this. I lambast them for not understanding, for not having read the text (or comprehending it if they have), but I doubt that's actually the truth. That would simply make the article an act of pure ignorance and presumption.
 
No; this is an entriely conscious act of desecration, of cultural vandalism, and a profound, multifarious insult not only to those of us that love the text, but to The Sun's own readers:
 
What O'Shea and Jacobs are effectively saying to you is: we know that you are too illiterate and incurious to go and read the text yourself, that you will simply swallow the tribal, rabble-rousing swill we are raping it in order to manufacture: we believe our readers are fucking idiots, without even the sufficient curiosity or capacity to download an e-copy of the book or to simply look up quotes from it on their mobile phones.
 
But, beyond that, it is an act of the most thuggish vandalism and desecration: As a lover of horror and of literature, as a writer of fiction directly inspired by the likes of Mary Shelley, this wanton, drunken, lurching, inarticulate vacuous assault upon literature and literacy themselves is disgusting conduct, especially from individuals that DO have the capacity to sit at their keyboards and actually type semi-coherent sentences, and who therefore benefit themselves from some degree of literacy and education.
 
It is a promotion of the most vile ignorance; a condemnation of critical capacity, as though actually engaging academically with a work of fiction is somehow a confection of liberal elitism, instead of what stories are, how and why they function.
 
Well, I say to O'Shea and Jacobs: you might feel insulated in your blithe ignorance as you rampage through our gardens and our temples, as you smear your filth across our sacred texts and artefacts, but believe me, there are no melting snowflakes here; you have trespassed where you have no business being, and invited others to do so. That you are paid to do so is one of the most flagrant examples of society's sickness I have ever seen.
 
You want to appeal to the “torch and pitchfork” crowd? Fine. Let's see how you feel when you are cast in the monster's role, when you are the grunting, unthinkingly violent and vandalistic thing you clearly wish your readers to believe of the monster, despite all literary evidence to the contrary.