COVER REVEAL: COMING FROM TITAN BOOKS JULY 2023, UNQUIET BY E. SAXEY

Coming from Titan Books July 2023,  Unquiet by E. Saxey
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We are honoured to bring you the exclusive cover reveal for Unquiet by E. Saxey, publishing by Titan Books in July 2023, (it's up for preorder if you want to grab a copy now). And we also have an exclusive extract from The Unquiet, scroll down for the full cover and the extract.  

A gripping horror debut novel from an exciting new voice in British horror in which young woman, mourning the death of her brother-in-law a year earlier, discovers him one evening in her garden and journeys to strange folk festivals, isolated communities and asylums, unravelling the mysterious circumstances of his disappearance. At once a tense, gripping mystery and a terrifying Victorian gothic horror, this is perfect for fans of The Haunting of Hill House and Sarah Waters.


Synopsis:

London 1893. Judith has been living alone in her family home for four months, the rest of her family travelling around the world whilst she tries desperately to get over the death of Sam, her brother-in-law, who drowned in an accident a year ago.

One icy evening, she discovers Sam, alive, in the garden. He has no memory of the past year, and remembers little of the accident that appeared to take his life.


Desperate to keep his reappearance a secret until she can discover the truth about what happened to him, Judith journeys outside of the West London Jewish community she calls home, to the scene of Sam’s accident, only to unearth secrets she never thought she would find.

Out July 2023 from Titan Books

Pre-order a copy here 

About the author:

E. Saxey is an ungendered Londoner who works in universities. Their fiction has appeared in Daily Science Fiction, Apex Magazine, Queers Destroy Science Fiction and in anthologies including Tales from the Vatican Vaults and The Lowest Heaven. They live in London and tweet at @esaxey

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Exclusive extract:
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I needed my charms to ward off madness. Scrabbling around in the cold scullery, I hauled out every drawer in the dresser to find myself a jam jar, a candle stub, a wineglass. I'd gathered them before but the maid had tidied them away. It was vital to bring them back together, and to open a new bottle of wine.

I had been alone in the house for four months. I didn't regret ridding myself of my family. But it was odd to live alone, unseen and unheard, and easy to feel untethered. Impossible to recreate the family routines which had dropped away — dinner on the eve of Sabbath, brushing my sister's hair, trips to take tea at Whiteleys. Instead, I had made routines of my own: rising at eight, art class at nine. I had invented rituals. Between them, I kept myself steady.

So tonight, I poured myself a glass of red wine. I intended to carry it down the long, narrow garden. Our house wasn’t large, having only six bedchambers, but Father had chosen it for its luxurious touches. It had fine rooms on the ground floor for visitors, and pillars at the front in an envious echo of nearby Kensington Palace Gardens. At the foot of the garden lay an ornamental lake. When I reached the lake, I’d spill some wine into the water, and drink the rest.

Lighting the candle wick, I dropped it into the jam jar, singeing my fingers. I was suddenly conscious that Mama would see this as a parody, in bad taste. Tonight was the first evening of Hanukkah; as I’d walked home, around sunset, I'd seen the candles in my neighbours’ windows. But I didn’t feel able to light our own, now Mama and my sister weren’t here.

As I carried the jar over to the kitchen door, the flame jumped up (a neighbour has gossip) and sparked (you will receive a letter soon). Outside the night was dark and bitingly cold. The moonlit silver tree-tops thrashed in the wind, and I loved it, because inside the house, nothing moved if I didn't move it. The maid, Lucy, could have helped, but she made it worse. She passed me in the hall without meeting my eyes, and tidied so vigorously that it appeared nobody lived in my house at all.
The gravel path didn't crunch under my feet. Had I become weightless? No, the gravel had frozen in place. This year, December had been unusually harsh.

After a minute of walking, the path gave out into lawn. My feet crushed prints into the frozen grass. I grasped my wine and my candle. I wouldn't be sent away for a rest cure, like the classmate of mine with bad nerves.

In our childhood, my sister Ruth and I had performed all kinds of elaborate ceremonies in this garden. It was large enough to get lost in, or at least evade observation. I made a fine witch, with my unruly hair and my bony face. I'd cast spells on every tree. Ruth, with her orderly ringlets, had played the princess. What did princesses do? Were they imprisoned in branches? Did they scry in the lake for true love? If only Ruth were here to remind me.

It was foolish to wish for Ruth because I let myself miss her. That pang multiplied, and I missed Mama, too. And — most painful, and most pointless — I missed Sam. His restless footsteps in our hall at the foot of the big staircase, his voice calling us to join him. I was hollow because he wasn't here.

Panic rattled me. I was a candle flame, wick snipped, flickering away into the night sky.

Walk the path, I told myself. Reach the lake. Drink the wine. Go back to your room and bury yourself in your bed.

But there was an uncanny glow to the garden ahead of me, a whiteness beyond the dark trees. I pushed branches aside to reach it.

The lake had been transformed: where dark water should have rippled, there was flat pale ice. It was fantastical. Pure white at the edges, where the lake met its border of marble curb stones. Grey towards the centre, where the ice thinned. Dark scrapes crossed the surface — from birds, trying to land on it?

How would I draw the ice? Layers of pale pastels, scraped through to dark paper? I could imagine my oily fingertips, a blunt blade.

It put me in mind of magical changes in ballads where rocks melt or a gate opens in a hill. Your love turns in your arms into red-hot metal, or a stranger. When had the lake last frozen? I recalled Mama snapping a warning in her native German as I ran towards it, then explaining in English that I'd drown if I set foot on it. I must have been very young.

A movement, on the far side of the white lake, and a rustling in the bushes. Probably a fox, wanting to drink and startled by the frost. I moved closer to the edge, with my wine and candle, and waited for it to emerge.

It wasn't a fox, it was Sam.

He stood just twenty feet from me. The moon was bright. The absolute familiarity of him stamped itself on my eyes.

He waved, then he beckoned. I couldn't move, so he walked towards me, one foot onto the white ice, and then another. Walking with complete confidence, not looking down, he trusted the ice to be thick enough to bear him.

Or, no — he hadn't trusted anything. He'd mistaken the lake for a solid surface. His foot slipped and he paused, looking down puzzled.

I shouted a warning.

He dropped straight down in a barrage of cracking. A fountain of moon-white water shot up from where he'd stood.

Then there was nothing left but a foaming dark hole, and jostling plates of broken ice.

I ran round the edge of the lake, as close as I could get to the hole where Sam had vanished. I threw myself down at the pool's edge, and kicked my toes into the earth to anchor myself. Stretching half my body onto the ice, I reached my arm out even further.

'Sam!'

Water pulsed out of the hole, dark green, and sucked back, and there was no sign of him.

I screamed for help, but was anyone in earshot? Lucy would be cloistered in her attic bedroom. The cold would sink Sam and the ice would trap him. He was drowned. No refusing it, no haggling.

Sam's head broke the surface. He made a great wheezing moan, dragging breath into his lungs. His arms punched out, and sliced through air and water. White foam flew everywhere around him. But his crashing was frantic, failing. He was going to sink again.

I yelled his name, stretching so far that the muscles under my arm burned.

Sam heaved himself forwards. He raised a dripping arm and reached out his hand to me.

I grabbed him. He didn't feel human. His skin was slimy and his hand slipped from my grasp. I seized the sleeve of his jacket instead. I found purchase, and I felt his icy fingers clamp around my wrist.

I tensed my agonised body and dragged him in, hearing the ice crack with every pull.

He let go, abruptly. Released, I tumbled onto the grass. Sam didn't fall back, though. He grabbed at clumps of reeds to haul himself up onto the marble curb stones and out of the water.

On all fours on the grass, he started retching. I crawled until I was near him, but what should I do? Beat on his back? He drove the heel of one hand into his own chest, gave a horrible grating cough and then spat. His barking shaking head, his black slicked hair like fur, made him wolf-like in the moonlight.

Finally he lifted his face up to me, almost unrecognisable. I knew I must be just as smeared with filth, as open-mouthed and disgusting. One stain on his forehead looked more like blood than mud. Ruth would have reached out to it, tended it. I recoiled.

Sam's hand, strong and cold, closed around my shoulder. When he pulled, I braced myself again, but he wasn't trying to drag me closer. He was using me as a prop, swinging awkwardly round into a sitting position. When he managed to sit, he still kept hold of me.

For a long while we only breathed, both of us in ragged rasps. My lungs felt like I'd inhaled hot ashes. My arm, and my whole side where I'd thrown myself onto the ground, throbbed in pain.

But the disbelief was sharper. It couldn't be him. It couldn't be.

'Sam?'

He met my eyes. 'Judith!'

His voice was weak but it was warm. It was him.
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He was back.

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