A gripping road trip through post-apocalyptic America from Tim Lebbon, New York Times bestseller and author of Netflix’s The Silence.


Struck by famine and drought, large swathes of North America are now known as the Desert. Set against this mythic and vast backdrop, The Last Storm is a timely story of a family of Rainmakers whose rare and arcane gift has become a curse.
 
Jesse stopped rainmaking the moment his abilities turned deadly, bringing down not just rain but scorpions, strange snakes and spiders. He thought he could help a land suffering from climate catastrophe, but he was wrong. When his daughter Ash inherited the tainted gift carried down the family bloodline, Jesse did his best to stop her. His attempt went tragically wrong, and ever since then he has believed himself responsible for his daughter's death.
 
But now his wife Karina––who never gave up looking for their daughter—brings news that Ash is still alive. And she's rainmaking again. Terrified of what she might bring down upon the desperate communities of the Desert, the estranged couple set out across the desolate landscape to find her. But Jesse and Karina are not the only ones looking for Ash. As the storms she conjures become more violent and deadly, some follow her seeking hope. And one is hungry for revenge.

The Last Storm is available for pre-order here 

The room was full of bad things. Three wooden crates stacked in one corner contained zip-locked bags of drugs. The lid had slipped from the top crate, and no one seemed concerned. There was nothing hidden here. The table pushed against the opposite wall was strewn with empty liquor bottles, overflowing ash trays, a cracked mirror dusted with what looked like heroin, a fat roll of dollar bills stained with something that wasn’t water, and a handgun. Propped against the table was an AR15 with a bump stock. Jesse wondered if it was there to intimidate him. It was probably just there.

“So you’re sure you can do this?” the man asked. He was one of the bad things in the room. He sat on a plastic chair, right ankle resting on his left knee. He was heavily bearded, hair expensively cut, and a delicate ring glimmered in his left nostril. He’d said his name was Wolf. It was ridiculous, but Jesse didn’t feel like laughing. A man and a woman stood just behind Wolf. Neither of them had spoken, but they both watched Jesse with calm weariness. He did not know their names, and didn’t want to know. He thought of them as Snake––the tall white guy with a bald head and tattoo of a python eating his left ear––and Harley, the short, muscled black woman in a Harley Quinn tee shirt.

“Yes,” Jesse said.

“Only, we’ve let you in now,” Wolf said, glancing around the place as if it was anything other than a wretched fucking pit. But he didn’t mean the room. “Let you see. Let you know. And you can’t unsee and unknow.”

“I don’t see anything,” Jesse said.  “And like I told you, it works best outside.”

“I don’t want you doing it outside,” Wolf said. “People might see.”

“Who?” Jesse asked. Perhaps there was too much challenge in his voice. Snake crossed his arms. Harley  shifted from her left foot to her right and back again. Stay calm, Jesse thought, even though calm was the last thing he felt.

“People,” Wolf said, drawing the word out. “Eyes in the sky.”

The man’s alleged concern made no sense. It was ridiculous. The small blockwork building stood within acres of poppy plants, and if anyone saw Jesse out there doing his thing, they’d also see them. Maybe the guy was made paranoid by his own product.

Jesse felt sweat running down his back. I’m such an idiot. He should have turned the other way when this opportunity arose, but  when first contact was made he and Karina were too broke for him to accept the depths of awfulness he was getting into––the secrecy, the guns, and the murdering thugs. As realisation had dawned he'd already been too deep, and the threat of violence for not going through with what he claimed he could do only dug him in deeper.

The only positive was that he was doing this a thousand miles from home. Karina and his sweet little Ash didn't even know where he was, and until this was over and he returned home with a wad of much-needed cash, that was how it would remain.
“Don’t worry, nobody knows me,” Jesse lied.

Wolf looked him up and down. Jesse let him, glancing instead at Snake and Harley. He wondered how many people they’d killed between them, and how, and cursed his vibrant imagination. They returned his gaze, expressionless.

He had to stay calm, level, unruffled. It wouldn’t work otherwise.  But he looked at the AR15, and the dusting of heroin, and the roll of stained cash that was probably meant for him, and realised again what a total idiot he’d been.

“Outside, then,” Wolf said, standing from his chair. He clapped his hands together and grinned. “But not for long.”

“It’ll be quick,” Jesse said. Another potential lie. He never really knew how long it would take, and that piled on more pressure. Once, in Omaha, he sat on his own in a dry riverbed for almost five hours before the first patter of light rain speckled the dusty ground.

Snake picked up the AR15 and handgun and left the hut. Harley inclined her head at the door to indicate Jesse should go next, and she and Wolf followed him out. Over Jesse’s shoulder he carried a small wooden case on a leather strap. The strap was worn and darkened from years of use. The case was inlaid with an intricate design of a large tree, canopy and roots mirroring each other. Different types of wood had been used to create the design, and over the years some of it had shrunk and fallen out, leaving only a shadowy memory. He had no idea who had made the case or where it came from. It had called to him from an old antique store. It had been empty, and he had filled it with his apparatus.

Wolf had not told his minions to search inside the case. He knew what it contained.

Outside, the heat struck Jesse a physical blow.  He squinted, dropping the sunglasses from his forehead back down over his eyes. He plucked the cap from his back pocket and pulled it tight onto his head.

Everything was dust. It coated his damp skin, scratched its way into his eyes and ears, his nostrils and the cracked creases of his lips. He felt it inside his clothing, settling into the contours of his body and chafing when he walked. It was the dust of dead things. Jesse looked down as he walked and kicked up dry, sterile grit, the ground begging for water to bring it back to life. The sun beat at the back of his neck, seeking to dry him out, leach from him the waters of life. Everything he did was to prevent that from happening, and to stop it from happening to others. He told himself that time and again. He told Karina and thought she believed him, hoped she did. He needed her to believe. Jesse needed the firm understanding that everything he did was from a position of control. That was the only way it would work. Confusion, stress, tension, fear, all were the enemy of his gift.


Stretching in every direction were row upon row of sickening poppy plants. Suspended above them on a grid of bamboo struts and wires, just above head height, were other creeping plants. He didn’t know their species, only that they too were almost dead, and so their purpose as camouflage was now moot. There were irrigation channels and a network of flexible hoses trailing beneath the loose planting structures, but many of the hoses were old and desiccated in the intense, unrelenting sunlight. Wolf had told him that for many years they’d been tapping into the nearby river, and then when that dried up the reservoir six miles away in the hills. Last year, that had also gone dry. The shrubs used to camouflage the crop had dried and died first, leaving the poppy fields exposed to aerial surveillance. It was only a matter of time until they were found out.

That was why Jesse was here, with his apparatus in the wooden case slung over his shoulder. He had come to make rain to save the crop and fill their water storage facilities. For that, Wolf had promised him sixty thousand dollars.

The art of his gift was what drove him, but there was also the money. And here, there was also his unspoken certainty that whether his attempt worked or not, this crop was doomed. If he could not bring rain, the plants would not last another month. If he could usher in a downpour, it would not only be a mere shower. That was not how it worked. His level of control was not quite as refined as he had claimed to Wolf. If and when his rains fell, they would do so in a storm that might wash away the loose, dried soil, flood the fields, strip away and drown many of these illicit crops.

Jesse knew he was an idiot. He only hoped he could take the money and run before the full deluge arrived and Wolf realised what he had done.

“Where?” Wolf asked.

“Here is fine,” Jesse said.

“You’re sure?” The drug farmer was eager and excited to see what Jesse could do. It was a normal reaction, but Jesse didn’t regard Wolf as a normal man.

Snake and Harley moved away, giving him distance and space as he stood looking around. The suspended camouflage crop was mostly pale, a sandy colour with occasional wan green patches where some plants clung to life. It was a familiar scene. The drought was deep and long, the world continued to change, and however much Jesse tried to help, he was little more than a speck of sand on a vast beach.

“So, what happens now?” Wolf asked.

“I set up,” Jesse said. He paused, looking directly at Wolf. “I need peace. And quiet. And solitude.”

Wolf gazed at the wooden box hanging from Jesse’s shoulder.

“Is it true you have to stick needles in your arms?” Wolf asked.

“It’s nothing like that,” Jesse said, trying to keep the disgust from his voice. But as Wolf shrugged, turned, and walked away, he had to wonder whether it was more similar than he'd care to admit.

Jesse breathed deeply a few times and turned his face to the sky. It was clear and pale blue, scorched almost cloudless by the unrelenting sun. He remembered his mother doing the same, and he had a rich, living memory of the first time he’d asked what she was doing. He’d been maybe five years old then, and she had been five years away from the flames that would consume her.

I’m wishing upon a cloud, she’d said, laughing as Jesse assumed the same position. See that one, son? It looks like an elephant.

He saw no elephants now. There were a few scattered cirrus clouds so high up that they were barely smudges against deep blue infinity. Other than that, the sky offered no signs of rain.

Jesse shrugged the box from his shoulders and opened the metal fastenings. Placing it carefully on the dusty ground, he knelt before it and opened the lid. The lid’s underside was still vibrant with the inlaid tree design, as if only the outside had been weathered and worn away by time. He sometimes wondered whether he was also like that. He was approaching forty, but sometimes it felt as though he’d already lived two lifetimes.

Continuing his deep breathing, he took out the apparatus. It was light and small, the length of his forearm, comprised of a series of tubes and bulbs, electrical components and brass casings, and other pieces gathered and gleaned from many sources. He’d built it as a teenager, hearing his mother’s whispered encouragement in his mind with each element he added, the turn of every screw. At one end was the focus, and he turned the dial that extruded the small, pointed horn that would aim at the sky.

Closing the lid of the box, he placed the locator pins in their corresponding holes, and then he was almost ready.

Almost.

He took two long wires and unspooled them, ensuring that both ends were connected correctly to the apparatus. Then he extracted two sterile needles from their lined container on one edge of the device and fitted them to the ends of the wires.

He glanced up to see Wolf watching from twenty metres away.

“I need to be on my own,” Jesse said.

“Right. On your own.” Wolf scuffed the dried soil with one of his boots, kicked at a plant stem. It crumbled beneath his foot, showering crumpled stem and leaves to the ground. “Just fix my place,” he said, and he turned away.

It was a strange turn of phrase. It almost left Jesse feeling sorry for him.

He pumped his fist, pushed one needle into his right forearm, and stuck it there with surgical tape, then did the same with the other. A tingle of anticipation made him shiver, even in the heat. Twin droplets of blood ran around his arms and dripped to the dusty ground, and were sucked down into the parched land. He wondered how much blood had been spilled into this arid soil, then he closed his eyes and shut away the idea. That was not his business.  He dealt not in drugs, but in rain, and his rush was not balanced with pain

Feeling the sun stretching the skin on his face, sweat running down his neck and torso, and the dusty, gritty reality of this dying land, Jesse closed his eyes and brought himself inward.

Soon, he heard the inner tides of his own personal storms as the thrilling flow began to build. He drifted with those tides. He let them carry him, knowing that he would always remain afloat, comfortable. Sometimes, he believed it was the only safe place. Even when he was with Karina he felt exposed and in danger. Everywhere he looked he saw the world stealing back control from humanity, punishment for so many years of abuse.

Jesse opened his inner eye to view the vague, dark pebbly beach he could not feel beneath his feet, the sea he would never smell, and the distant shadow of tall cliffs to his right, and felt himself balanced perfectly between them all. This was his place. He called it The Shore.

At some distance he heard the soft whirl of his apparatus starting to spin, turn and cycle, and smelled the faintly familiar tang of ozone on the air.
Eyes still closed, he waited for the first drops of rain to fall.


*


When Jesse opened his eyes, Harley was crouched before him pointing a pistol at his face.

“I call bullshit,” she said. “I don’t know how you were ever taken in by this.”

“Have faith, Lucy-Anne,” Wolf said from somewhere behind Jesse.

The name didn’t suit her. It was too nice. She didn’t look nice.

Harley tilted her head slightly. “He’s awake.”

“I don’t sleep,” Jesse said.

“We’ve been calling your name,” Harley said.

“And like I told your boss––”

“His name’s Wolf.”

“Like I told Wolf, I need peace and silence, otherwise it might not work.”

“You’ve had over an hour of peace and silence.”

Jesse was shocked at how long had passed, but he could see that she was right. The sun was dipping towards the western hills. Shadows were longer, the heat was heavy and old as a memory, and he shivered as a bead of sweat ran down his back.
“Have faith,” Wolf said again, this time from just behind him. Jesse heard the man kneeling in the dust. “But how long, Jesse?”

Jesse glanced down at the apparatus. Dials turned lazy revolutions, a bulb emitted a low illumination. The needles in his arms tingled as they transmitted low power from him into the device and back again, an arcane symbiosis.

“Soon,” he said.

“Make it sooner,” Wolf said. “Lucy-Anne, don’t be an asshole.”

Harley lowered the gun but remained squatting close in front of him. There was an ugliness in her eyes that was reflected in Wolf’s and Snake’s. Maybe violence left its mark in your soul, like blood on dirty money.

“Let me––” Jesse began.

“Just fucking do it!” Wolf’s shout was so loud, close and unexpected that Jesse fell forward, almost sprawling across the apparatus. One of the wires tautened and tugged at the needle in his right forearm, and he yelped as a trickle of blood emerged from beneath the tape.

“Okay!” Jesse said. He straightened himself, trying to ease his beating heart. The bulb glowed brighter. The dial span faster. A noise came from the apparatus, like an engine grinding on dirty oil, parts wearing and corroding.

“That mean it’s working?” Wolf asked.

“Yes,” Jesse said, because to answer any other way would buy him pain, or worse. He looked up to the sky where a grey sheen dulled the deep blue, and the first hint of clouds had begun to form.

How could he tell Wolf the truth?

Did he even want to?

Jesse craved the rains as much as anyone else. This was his art, his living, and each time he attempted to make rain  it felt like a treat. Even when he wasn’t sure it would work. It didn't always. His was a fickle talent.

“Faster!” Wolf said, flicking the back of Jesse’s head.

“Look, boss!” Snake said. Standing off to Jesse’s left, surrounded by dead and dying plants, he was looking up at the sky like a kid watching plane trails.

“I see,” Wolf said. “Faster! It’s working!”

Jesse tried to ignore the pain where the needle entered his right arm, and the fear growing inside at what he had begun here. It was something different from before, something wrong, and the knowledge that there was no going back sat in the pit of his stomach, a hot knot growing, eating. Getting worse.

“Yes!” Harley said. She’d holstered her gun and was also looking up. “It’s good, boss. Gonna be good!”

Gonna be good, Jesse thought, and the apparatus ground as its components spun and spat. I should stop. Sparks tickled his forearm, dancing from the needles and along the wires. He smelled hair singeing across his skin. This all feels wrong. His ears rang with distant thunder, and he knew that it only sounded inside, rolling along The Shore as if announcing something bad.

It had been like this several times before––a feeling of dread, an unknown danger looming from The Shore––and he’d always been able to stop. If he stopped now, he’d end up feeding the poppies with a bullet in his skull.

The first spot of rain struck his forehead and ran down beside his nose.

“You asked for this,” Jesse whispered, and he didn’t know what this was, and wasn’t sure that any of them even heard beneath the sudden, sweet sound of falling rain.

Snake started jumping up and down and whooping. Harley stood with her head back and tongue out. Wolf was more restrained, talking on his phone and instructing someone to prepare the rain catchers, ensure the irrigation controls were set, oversee the storage of as much water as they could catch and save.

Jesse waited. The fear, the sickness, had not abated at all, and he knew that the storm he had seeded was far from over, and far more than a simple storm. The Shore remained distant but something about it was altered.

Jesse closed his eyes and let his apparatus spin and grind and whirl him back to that place. Until now anything he’d sensed of The Shore had been a part of him––the soft hush of the sea was his pulse in his ears; the tang of that distant beach was the fresh hint of rain on the air. Now, though, he was more there than he had ever been before. The thick, oily sea’s water surged, dipping and rising as if something huge was striving to thrust through the thick surface. Where it broke on The Shore the water seemed to become pebbles, rolling black beads washing up the beach. To his right the cliffs loomed, a solid wall that seemed to tug on the whole scene with their gravity. Creatures  flitted through the air and scampered across the ground, but they were as vague as memories, so fast and fleeting that he couldn’t focus on them.

Far along the beach, in a hazy distance where reality faded to dream, several groups of huddled shapes stretched taller and turned grey faces his way.

He had never noticed The Shore noticing him before. And it was terrible.

As Jesse exerted a huge effort to pull himself back and away from The Shore, Wolf grabbed his shoulder and squeezed, as if they were friends or colleagues. Jesse leaned to the left and vomited, making sure to miss the apparatus where raindrops spattered across its hot surface. Wolf seemed unconcerned. Perhaps he thought that puking was just part of the show.

“What the hell?” Snake asked.

Jesse looked to where the man danced between dying plants, scratching at his back with both hands.

“It’s rain, you idiot!” Harley called, her voice high with delight.

Something squirmed on the ground in front of Jesse. It scrambled in the dirt before righting itself. A scorpion.

Woken in the dust? Brought up by the rain?

Its legs scraped at the damp, loose soil as if it had never felt ground beneath its feet before, then it darted towards him.

He was shocked, and at the same time not shocked at all.

He lifted the box and apparatus and brought them down on the creature. The needle was tugged from his right arm with a spurt of blood that mixed with the rain, feeding the ground. He vomited again. His head thudded, thunder rolled, and this time he wasn’t sure whether it was within or without.

“Woo hoo!” Harley shouted, splashing in puddles like an excited child. The rain was a deluge now, sheeting down and soaking the ground, the poppy plants, and the climbing shrubs suspended above to camouflage their existence. Some leaves and stems came apart beneath the battering downpour, too dry and decayed to survive. Others seemed to shiver and shimmer in the rain. Dust was washed from leaves, revealing pale green tints that might grow lush once more.

“Ouch!” Snake said. “Motherfucker! What the fuck––?” He slipped and fell. Jesse saw several scampering shapes converging on the fallen man through pooling water.

“Mike?” Harley asked. “Mike?”

Mike screamed.

Jesse stood and unplugged his other arm from the apparatus. Something bounced from his right shoulder, and he saw the scorpion hit the ground. He stepped on it, crushing it into the mud. He snatched up the apparatus and box, wincing as it burned his hands but knowing he could never let go.

Harley was dashing through rows of plants towards her fallen companion.

“What have you done?” Wolf asked behind him.

Jesse turned, bringing the apparatus up before him to fend off any attack. But Wolf was beyond violence. His left hand was fisted around the remains of a scorpion, its sting curled into his knuckles. Another was tangled in his beard. His bottom lip was already swollen, and his eyes were glassy and wet, reflecting the rainy dream he had been living for so long.
“I brought rain,” Jesse said.
Wolf took a step forward, right hand raised as if ready to grab him. Jesse stood back to let him fall, then he stepped over the twitching, groaning man to head back towards the relative safety of the building. Lightning thrashed and thunder rolled.
    
Between rows of plants he saw a hint of movement, a pale face, and then shadows fell again.

He ran. Water washed dust and sweat from his skin, but some of it was slick and warm, like blood. His forearms bled. Sickness rose in him again, a reaction to what he had done, mourning what he had wanted to do. He’d only ever wished to bring rain. Not anything else. Not this.

Ten metres from the building, as he splashed through mud and saw a pinkish hue to the flowing water, a shape burst from the plant rows beside him. Harley stumbled closer, hand pressed against her neck. She could barely stand.

“Bastard,” she said, voice slurred and almost lost to the storm.

“You should have let me do it my way. I told you. I warned you.”

“Bastard...”

Jesse lifted the wooden box ready to swing at her, but paused with it raised over his shoulder. If he struck her, broke the box and apparatus apart, he might never be able to do this again.

Harley lifted the gun in her other hand and shot him in the face.

Lightning. Thunder.
​
Darkness.

THE FIRST HORROR BOOK I REMEMBER READING 

A book for kids by Aiden Chambers called Haunted Houses, which told the stories of a dozen or so real-life hauntings. It was terrifying and I loved every word of it.


THE FIRST HORROR MOVIE I REMEMBER WATCHING 

One night, when I was about 7 or 8, I came downstairs because I couldn’t sleep and the original Vincent Price version of The Fly was just starting on TV. “Ooo, can I watch this, Dad?”
“No, you can’t, it’s not for children.”
“Pleasepleasepleasepleaseplease?”
“OK, fine. You’ll be scared!”
I was. A lot.

THE GREATEST HORROR BOOK OF ALL TIME 

You can’t do better than a volume of H.P.Lovecraft short stories.


THE GREATEST HORROR FILM OF ALL TIME
​
My all-time favourite is James Whale’s Bride of Frankenstein, but for sheer un-nerving fear I’d say either Hereditary or, of course, The Shining.


THE GREATEST WRITER OF ALL TIME

I think it’s a tie between Lovecraft, Poe and Shirley Jackson.


THE BEST BOOK COVER OF ALL TIME

Any of the covers for the old paperback Pan Books of Horror Stories, but especially the second and fourth volumes. Whoever designed them was a genius.


THE BEST FILM POSTER OF ALL TIME

The ‘80s version of Fright Night. Still creeps me out.


THE BEST BOOK / FILM I HAVE WRITTEN

Well, I’m hoping I haven’t written it yet, but the one I’m most proud of is my new novel The Workshop of Filthy Creation. It’s taken well over a decade to get from head to page.


THE WORST BOOK / FILM I HAVE WRITTEN

I know exactly which one, and no, I’m not going to tell you the title. It wasn’t horror, I’ll say that much.


THE MOST UNDERRATED FILM OF ALL TIME

There’s a recent low budget British horror-comedy called Double Date, which is just brilliant. It includes the best punch-up I’ve ever seen!


THE MOST UNDERRATED BOOK OF ALL TIME

The Darkest of Nights by Charles Eric Maine. It’s SF, but it’s certainly scary!

THE MOST UNDERRATED AUTHOR OF ALL TIME

I’m surprised Michael McDowell isn’t better known, but at least some of his work is being reprinted now.

THE BOOK / FILM THAT SCARED ME THE MOST

Orwell’s 1984. End of.


THE BOOK / FILM I AM WORKING ON NEXT

I’m currently writing a haunted house story set in the 1970s, and after that I’ll be doing a sort of semi-follow-up to The Workshop of Filthy Creation.

​In the autumn of 1879, an intelligent, artificially-created being — outwardly a young woman called Maria — arrives in London under the protection of biologist Professor George Hobson. He gathers a few close friends and reveals her existence, explaining that she is the final result of a research programme undertaken by a dynasty of unethical scientists, the von Frakkens. All are now dead... or so it's thought.


Maria's mutilated creator tracks her down, and she goes on the run, pursued by both her creator and the police. She finds herself at the heart of a raging controversy: some want her jailed, some want her dead, and some want to peel the flesh from her bones.


Thrilling and evocative, fantastical and grotesque, The Workshop of Filthy Creation uses a Frankenstein-ian thread to stitch together elements of real scientific history with the darkest parts of Victorian London and speculation on the nature of human life.

"A remarkable book... The perfect combination of big ideas and a rattling good yarn. Hell of a read" - James Kinsley, author of Playtime's Over


"I adore this book... a Victorian romp, a philosophical tract, and an examination of class and privilege, as well as being a pretty gory horror novel, much like the original Frankenstein in many ways" - Goodreads

https://richardgadz.co.uk/the-workshop-of-filthy-creation/
​

Fitting Katherine into the mold of a typically male archetype establishes the film’s exploration of gender roles and sexuality. In the documentary In Search of Darkness: A Journey Into Iconic 80s Horror, Gordon explains: “In From Beyond, Barbara plays the mad scientist essentially. And Jeffrey Combs is the victim. In a way, From Beyond reversed the roles that they played in Re-Animator.” Whereas Katherine drives the action, Crawford is indeed the victim. In the Blu-ray commentary track, Combs notes that he did a lot of “laying around in this movie, just kinda unconscious and helpless.” Yuzna concurs: “You’re not used to having that kind of sensitive or…” “Passivity,” Combs fills in, “no.” This switch highlights horror’s tendency, particularly in the 1980s, to portray action that happens to women. Cases of victimized men, as in The Evil Dead (1981) and A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy’s Revenge (1985), are exceptions that prove the rule. While there is power in the portrayal of female survival, it’s also a double-edged sword. At its worst, the significant lack of male characters’ passivity in this period of filmmaking enforces a binaristic presentation of gender. In her consistent resistance to the medical and scientific establishment’s norms, Katherine disrupts convention.
​
Of course, From Beyond isn’t a simple case of gender role reversal. A queer sensibility peravdes the film. It’s certainly an early purveyor of bisexual lighting. As if the archetypal reversal wasn’t enough, the blatant portrayal of BDSM and Crawford’s subtextually queer relationship with Pretorious cement From Beyond’s investment in sexuality and the malleability of bodies. As Combs puts it, “[T]he whole movie is about stimulating people’s sexuality.” Its exploration of pain, pleasure, and comprehensive sensuality through the pineal gland as a channel for a sixth sense suggests that repression is an all too familiar experience; only when we open ourselves to new—more—modes of perception can we actualize ourselves. But, the film warns, we can lose ourselves too.

Under the influence of the Resonator, Katherine’s sexuality emerges from her (literally) buttoned-up personality. It likewise corresponds with her unethical methods; her illicit visit to the Resonator prompts her awakening. Crampton comments in In Search of Darkness, “I was able to do a lot in that characterization in the space of one movie. Because of the Resonator, I was able to get in touch with my deep urgings and repressed feelings.” In perhaps the most cited scene, Katherine dons Pretorious’s fetish leather. Having just turned on the Resonator and been assaulted by Pretorious, Katherine is at once distrubed by the experiment (Crampton’s acting grounds the moment splendidly) and is seduced by it. In its aftermath, she straddles Crawford as he lay insensate on a bed. Only when confronted by Bubba does she relent. The film’s ultimate power resides in characters’ abilities to wield their sexualities, or others’. Towards the end of the film, Katherine is momentarily imprisoned by Crawford. She bites off his extended pineal gland (which Jeffrey Combs routinely jokes is just a “dog dick”) and frees herself and Crawford—who is metaphorically castrated—from its influence. Bubba’s insight is apt: “It's changing us, doc. All of us. And not for the better.” In each case, sexual awakenings are paired with assault. In the world of From Beyond, sexuality can mean either the loss of identity through uncontrollable urges or, as for Pretorious, liberation.

Pretorious’s antagonism is defined by his excessive sexuality: he is a (poor) practitioner of BDSM; he consistently attempts to pull Katherine into the beyond by “kissing” (i.e., killing) her; and his relationship with Crawford teems with subtext. Like mad science, queerness isn’t an unusual topic for the film’s creators; in addition to Re-Animator’s queer themes, Yuzna’s Society (1989) is undeniably homoerotic. The choice to place Pretorious and Crawford in the same house with a lab—rather than at Miskatonic University or another professional space—frames the pair as strangely domestic. An abusive undercurrent, however, defines the physicists’ relationship. In a moment that hints at something more than mentor-mentee professionalism, Crawford tells Bubba that Pretorious “used to bring beautiful women here. They’d eat fine meals, drink fine wine, listen to music. But it always ended in screaming. And I would just lie there and listen to them. Screaming.” When Bubba responds, “Your boss had some screws loose,” Crawford replies defensively: “He was a genius. It’s just that the five senses weren’t enough for him. He wanted more.” Effectively drawing a comparison between transgressive sexuality and mad science, this moment frames From Beyond’s dominant themes. The search for knowledge becomes an act of sensuality in itself.

Other moments between Crawford and Pretorious are notably sexual: upon his return “from beyond” as a transformed being, a naked Pretorious welcomes Crawford home and invites Crawford to touch him “if it pleases him”; he voyeuristically tells Crawford and Katherine “Don’t stop” when they break their kiss; Crawford calls his mentor by the personable “Edward”; and Crawford, at the film’s climax, retorts with surprising familiarity that Pretorious “never knew pleasure, or gave it, only pain.” Crawford’s mixed-bag of emotions for Pretorious make his death by fleshy incorporation even more disturbing; he resists him and ultimately aids Katherine’s escape but only after his body collapses with Pretorious.

Bodily malleability is also central to From Beyond’s expression of “more.” Under the Resonator’s vibrations, transdimensional creatures appear. Modeled after tapeworms, eels, jellyfish, and insects, these creatures attack: if you can see them, they can see you. Pretorious’s “death” at the hands of these creatures, he explains, was only that of his former self. In his new state, he becomes an inarticulate mass of flesh. He changes at will, possesses “total bodily control on a molecular level,” and shares an identity with the creature that ate him in the opening sequence. When passed beyond, bodies obtain a Play-Doh-like malleability. Though Pretorious maintains the “mind is indivisible,” he also contends, “Bodies change.” At the climax, Crawford is rebirthed from a mass of gooey flesh and then is sucked back inside. It’s Pretorious’s body but no longer distinguishable from Crawford’s—their heads face one another, connected by elastic slimy tissue.

To Pretorious, these changes are a mark of scientific achievement. Horrified by his mentor’s return, Crawford asks, “Edward, my God, what have you become?” Pretorious declares, “Myself.” From Beyond contemplates liberation through anatomic instability: with science, the body can become what the mind imagines. If, perhaps, a trans reading of From Beyond can be proffered (and I think it easily can), it lies in the fact that the Resonator is a device that, in essence, crosses boundaries. In human subjects, this boundary-crossing manifests as sexual stimulation and bodily transcendence. It induces transitions, awakenings. The Resonsator ramps up the sex drive, yes, but it is also a vehicle for fluidity—sexually, bodily, dimensionally.

From Beyond, like many horror films, ultimately disposes of its worst transgressors. It warns us against excess. Yet, it remains provocative in its potential. And, like Re-Animator, it stops short of reinstating the status quo. Horror’s complexity resides in its desire to rid the world of the sins in which it luxuriates. Despite the villianization of BDSM and the association of queerness with violence, these moments of possibility offer much more than its conclusion limits. Rather than sweep gender and sexuality under the rug, From Beyond is willing to broach them and to do it with style. Anyway, I’d rather watch Jeffrey Combs slip and slide with a giant worm than an innocuous romcom where everything ends peachy keen. As audiences, we don’t watch for the moral message. We’re here for the sex and the slime. So is From Beyond.

From Beyond’s charm is a little bit Jeffrey Combs looking at the camera dead-on, enunciating, “It ate him. Bit off his head. Like a gingerbread man,” a little bit Ken Foree running around in skimpy underpants and a gun, and a lot of Barbara Crampton’s versatility as one of cinema’s foremost female mad scientists. The stunning practical effects by John Carl Buechler are also substantive, as is the film’s tonal earnestness. It’s not without plot holes and, sure, there’s phallic imagery everywhere you look and forays into electroshock therapy, but it takes itself seriously. It wants us to do the same. What other ’80s horror flick is going to invoke Kant to ensure you know the science behind the pineal gland isn’t made-up movie logic? From Beyond balances a lot at once and it never settles for less. It can chew brain and walk at the same time.

Most of all, though, it’s an ode to the late director’s sensibility for whom more was never enough. Thirty-five years later, From Beyond still thrills the persistently curious. It’s a film for the never-satisfied, those of us who want more, more, more. Under Gordon’s unique direction, mad science isn’t the deviance of a singular person but rather the wild, untapped potential that lies in us all—if only we let it. When Dr. Katherine McMichaels says, “There’s always more to see,” we’re with her. Flip the switch. Let the pink light pour in. I wanna see more.

THE FIRST HORROR BOOK I REMEMBER READING 

It was The Dark Half by Stephen King. I was maybe thirteen at the time so needless to say it blew my hair back. Oddly enough the scenes I found the most disturbing were actually the story within a story parts. The excerpts from George Stark’s novels that gave us brief and bloody glimpses into the world of Alexis Machine. If I remember correctly there was a scene where he was torturing a member of a rival crime family and he popped their eyeball with a paperclip. I read that chapter repeatedly. In retrospect I think was trying to understand the gut-wrenching feeling it gave me. It was the cruelest scenario my mind had ever encountered, and it invoked a feeling of revulsion I had never known.



THE FIRST HORROR MOVIE I REMEMBER WATCHING 

I don’t know that it was the first, but the one that really sticks with me in a profound way is Phantasm. My parents had recently gotten divorced. My mom enrolled in night school to get her GED, and my brother and I were a couple of early 90’s latch key kids. It was a Friday night in October, the days had grown short, and the world felt increasingly uncertain. We lived in a double-wide trailer out in the woods and the onset of night made the trees that surrounded us feel oppressive and sinister. I remember that part really freaked my brother out. He was younger and having a harder time with the absence of our dad. As an older brother I was pretty much duty bound to find a scary movie to watch right?

So, we watched Phantasm and we loved it. It’s a weird movie that doesn’t try to make sense or offer anything in the way of exposition. The narrative feels like a hallucination, or a nightmare, and Angus Scrimm absolutely owns the Tall Man role. I mean you look at that character and you can practically smell the formaldehyde and sulfur coming off him. The flying spheres, the green blood, severed fingers turning into weird-ass hornets, and the deformed dwarf zombies running around all make for a surreal kind of horror that veers into dark sci-fi at times.

THE GREATEST HORROR BOOK OF ALL TIME 

I was going to call this one a tie between Salem’s Lot and The Croning by Laird Barron, but then I thought about how many millions of readers King has and decided to go with the dark horse on this one. The Croning. It’s very modern in style, tone, and its brevity. He keeps you in that world just long enough to convey the story but not so long that you can acclimate to it. The sense of dread permeates the pages, the story is intriguing start to finish, and the reveal is such a profane gut punch. I listened to it on audiobook, and I remember I finished it at my writing desk out in my garage. It was back when I used to drink, so I was deep into my cups. The story ended and I just sat there staring at the wall, drunk and frightened, and just thinking “wow that was amazing.” That next month Mr. Barron was doing a Q&A book signing at a local bookstore, so I was lucky enough to pick-up the paperback and get it signed. I’ve read that copy a couple of times now. I imagine I’ll read it a few more times.


THE GREATEST HORROR FILM OF ALL TIME 

Halloween (1978). It’s classified as a slasher, but it has the atmosphere and slow-burning suspense of a gothic story. The cinematography is haunting, the story ensnares you, and the musical score stalks you throughout the film.

It’s a cultural icon and at this point is just as much a part of the holiday as trick or treating itself. If I really sit and concentrate, I can maybe pull up little faded snippets of childhood Halloween memories. The smell of wax teeth or cheap make-up, the chill in the air and how it crept through my costume, and little chubby me trying to breathe through a mask while navigating the dark with a flashlight or a glow stick. These memories invoke a feeling, something fleeting as smoke but loaded with the weight of time. That movie invokes those feelings too, it’s like a magic spell, or at least as much magic as anything I’ve ever encountered.

THE GREATEST WRITER OF ALL TIME

Stephen King. He’s singular in talent and achievement. Most people might not love every book he writes, if they even have time to read them all, but most people will love at least one of them.

THE BEST BOOK COVER OF ALL TIME

I struggled with whether to be honest or humble on this one. I decided to be honest. For me the best book cover of all time is the cover of my novel Cosmovorous. Don Noble at Rooster Republic Press did the art and I think it’s one the most beautifully bizarre images I’ve ever seen. It was a pre-made job also, I didn’t put any input into its creation. It just happened to be an uncannily appropriate visual representation for the story I was writing.


THE BEST FILM POSTER OFF ALL TIME


Alien. There’s a lot of psychological and maybe sub-conscious technique being used there. The weird egg suspended in a field of black, oozing that glowing green yolk, and below it an unrecognizable grid pattern that makes you think of a hive or a nest. The font is that sterile Helvetica Black with all that empty space between the letters. Because that is the scary part about the cosmos, all that empty space, and every centimeter of it lethal. That’s the part that freaks me out at least. Distances so vast they exceed our lifespans and defy any means of conveyance we’ve yet to engineer. Then, just in case all of that slipped by, they even put it right at the bottom, “In Space No one Can Hear You Scream.”


THE BEST BOOK / FILM I HAVE WRITTEN

Cosmovorous. I spent over three years working on it and looking back I understand what a liminal experience writing that novel was for me. I learned a lot about myself in the process. I can truly say I know who I am, what I value, and that I wrote the story I wanted to read. Apparently, I wanted to read a dark, gritty cosmic horror story with a strong female protagonist, because that is what I wrote.

THE WORST BOOK / FILM I HAVE WRITTEN

I have an entire cemetery of first acts that didn’t grow legs. I’m not afraid to get 10,000 words in, look at my creation, and then kill it.  If it doesn’t excite me to write it, how could it possibly excite anyone to read it. Life is too short, and time is too precious.

THE MOST UNDERRATED FILM OF ALL TIME

Halloween III. I think if the internet had existed back in 1982 people would have received that one better, because Mr. Carpenter could have gotten the word out as to what he was doing. I really like the movie, but I could understand how if someone went into that theater expecting Michael Myers and all they got was Conal Cochran, there might be some disappointment. If you watch it for what it is, however, it’s a pretty cool movie. I mean the scale of what is at stake is so much larger than any threat Michael Myers ever posed and the only person who’s trying to stop it is Dr. Dan Challis, who happens to be a drunk and a lecher.  It’s a pretty bleak scenario you’re up against. It also has all the awesome shots with the Silver Shamrock mask and that unapologetically synth wave soundtrack.


THE MOST UNDERRATED BOOK OF ALL TIME

All of them. We should all read more. Me included. I mean I get it, it’s so much easier to scroll through videos on your smart phone, and I do it more than I wish I did. I just know on the days that I pick up a book instead I tend to be happier.

THE MOST UNDERRATED AUTHOR OF ALL TIME


I think John Langan should have at least one work adapted to movie or television already. He has so many cool stories.

THE BOOK / FILM THAT SCARED ME THE MOST

As a child the movie was C.H.U.D. I caught that one on a UHF channel on a Saturday afternoon back in the 80’s. I couldn’t watch it, it scared the hell out of me.

As an adult the book was The Road by Cormac McCarthy. I read that twice in one weekend and it got to me. I mean if you can read something at thirty years old, that gives you nightmares so intense that you wake up and lie there in bed scared, you know you are dealing with an exceptional piece of literature.

THE BOOK / FILM I AM WORKING ON NEXT 

I’m two stories deep into a collection of cosmic horror stories. I’m writing each one towards an over arching theme that when new gods or new devils arise, they always think they are the only ones that exist, while the truth is there have been many before them and there will be many more after. Essentially the universe is older and vaster than even the gods can comprehend. I’m trying to approach the cosmic horror of each story from a different angle. I have a psychological horror story and a bizarro slasher story so far. I’m working on a dark sci-fi story and a small-town cryptid story also. I tend to write longer stories, so I’m thinking five stories between 10,000 to 12,000 words will be where I end up.  I’m hoping to get this out by June 2022.

Remembering some truly epic exploration horror movies ​

Not many people salivate at the prospect of being left alone in a dark and isolated location. That is exactly why many memorable horror movies have featured people being put in that exact situation. Some of the locations themselves look scary enough before things start to go wrong, but the various creatures that begin to surface and the strange happenings which start to occur elevate the feeling of fear even more so.


These types of horror productions provide the viewer with an immersive experience, taking them on a journey of chilling, eerie and sometimes evil adventures. From ghostlike creatures to dog-faced gods of death, much like those featured in the Book of Dead slot game, movies of this nature take us on a powerful, hair-raising escapade with a number of heart-stopping moments. The sense of isolation exploration horror movies provide helps boost other feelings of terror and adds to the all-around agonising offering an adventure gone wrong specialises in. Over the years, we’ve been treated to some truly epic exploration horror movies too. Below is a look at some of them.


The Ruins


A much-loved release from 2008, The Ruins follows a group of friends and a tourist they met along the way on their holiday to Mexico. Part of the journey involves a remote archaeological dig in the jungle where, as you might expect, an evil presence lives among the ruins. With plenty of gore and a true taste of the supernatural, The Ruins is worth checking out if you haven’t done so already.


Among The Living


When three friends decide to venture into the countryside after the last day of school, things were never really going to go smoothly, were they? That’s exactly what happens in Among The Living as Dan, Tom and Victor discover an abandoned old film studio. As the three friends are exploring the abandoned and rundown building, they aren’t aware that they are disturbing Isaac and Klarence Shooter, a man and his strange son who frequent it. From there, what follows is terrifying in this slasher masterpiece.

​The Strangeness


A true classic from 1985, The Strangeness is a movie based on a group of explorers which find themselves trapped in a cave after they undertake a mission to explore an abandoned goldmine. They aren’t alone down there, though, as a slimy and mysterious creature begins to terrorise them is this truly distressing release.


 Black Mountain Side

(Image via https://twitter.com/Jooliasez)

A 2014 movie, Black Mountain Side follows a group of archaeologists as they uncover a strange structure in Northern Canada that dates over ten thousand years old. Despite their amazing find, things take a turn for the worst when their communication system begins to fail, and they start to feel the effects of being in isolation. As the feelings of solitude begin to take over, things start to get a whole lot worse for the group.


As Above, So Below


Admittedly, not everyone enjoyed As Above, So Below, but there is no doubting that it serves up the occasional spooky moment. The story focuses on a team of explorers who decide to see what lies beneath the streets of Paris with an adventure underground into the catacombs. The found footage will divide some, but overall it does offer an intense viewing experience given the difficulties the team find themselves in.


Outpost


Released in 2007, Outpost centres around a scientist and businessman who hires a former Royal Marine and his assembled team to take him into no man’s land after the area has been destroyed by war. Once they get to the old military bunker in Eastern Europe, things start to go wrong.

The Curse of Nostalgia?

When I talked to Jim the other day and said I’d love to write a little something about The Sufferer’s Song for Gingernuts I had all these grand ideas about what I’d love to tackle, I mean, how often is it that I’ll get to let something out of the dusty recesses of the trunk and into the light of day after thirty years? The answer is, of course, only once. And here I am. Tomorrow I turn 52 and it will be 30 years since I wrote the first line of The Sufferer’s Song.

Thirty years. Motherf#%&er.

It’s not even a where did the time go thing, it’s gone, could have had kids that themselves would be drinking and screwing around. I mean… bloody hell. There’s part of me that still feels like a new kid on the block, and this thing was written when New Kids on the Block were still a thing and Mark hadn’t dropped the Markey and Donnie was the most famous of the Wahlberg’s. I don’t even know how I am supposed to react to that.
​
It’s quite funny, over the last few years the only time I’ve written horror has been to dip back into a very unreliable memory and revisit summer holidays and funfairs in Shiftling and Scavenger Summer, and lace stuff with memories of what it was like to be a teenager in the 80s, but here’s this thing I wrote that isn’t a nostalgia piece, but rather a product of its time. It’s pure Newcastle, 1992-3. The sense of crumbling identity is all through it, of course it is, it was a time when the pits had closed, the shipyards were closing, the steel mills were closing, and hope was being extinguished one layoff at a time. Back then I’d graduated and was trying to work out what to do with my life. I’d not yet hit upon the idea I wanted to pursue about my PhD, which would be about the impact of region upon horror and why cities like Liverpool and Newcastle were hotbeds for horror talent, and so little was coming out of rural England. It was again all about the hope and despair of Enterprise Zones, of Income Support, of poverty being punished and how hard it was for an angry young man to escape. There’s a couple of characters in The Sufferer’s Song, Johnny Lisker and Alex Slater, that represent both sides of my life back then. There’s Alex, who would appear to have hope, he’s smart, he’s falling in love, he’s not doomed by the poverty all around him and might have another life outside of the papermill that employs most of the village, and there’s Johnny, who has none of those prospects and is angry to the point of trying to fight his way out with his damned fists if he has to.

Looking back, it’s interesting to see how different parts of me filtered into this story, and how recognisable they are to me even now, thirty years removed. But then, don’t they always tell us to write what we know?

When I say I came from a place of poverty, I’m not exaggerating, but I was shielded from it. My mum tells a story of it now where her and my step dad had a choice of a bowl of French onion soup in a cheap café in Durham or the last bit of petrol needed to get home from my sister’s uni interview because there was no more money. My uni diet consisted of pasties and cheese on toast. There was a time when the bailiffs were looking at court for unpaid council tax because it was that or food and I decided eating was priority one.

So, out of all of this, writing became my escape, the route one to a better life. And this was the book that was going to do it for me. How did I know this? Well, for one, it was back at a time when I was lucky in so many other ways. I had good friends and mentors helping steer me in the likes of Richard Laymon, who had been something of a pen friend for a few years, and who offered all sorts of encouragement during the writing process, my agent, who had sold a book of mine written when I was 19, before Sting had gone on his Rainforest Crusade and crushed that hope right along with the collapse of the Net Book Agreement. But looking back it’s hard to really grasp the hell that was my life back then.

I jokingly say this is the book that cost me my first agent, but it’s no joke. I delivered it, she expected another Secret Life of Colours, all fabulist and strange. What she got was a fusion of Shaun Hutson/Richard Laymon and a small scale The Stand, all things that I was obsessed with during that time. In one of his letters, Dick had suggested that big was better, and encouraged me to write a long novel, really long, not the 60k-80k of my first, but something twice, maybe even three times that, and do what King does so well, let the characters breath and grow into their story – hold back the inciting incident and instead focus on bringing the little Northumbrian town of my story to life. In so many ways this book owes its finished form to him, and his gentle advice from four thousand miles away.

Tanya, my agent, hated it with a passion. I mean a truth loathing. I put it on her desk thinking it would change my life, but had no idea how it would. She returned the manuscript along with a curt four line note saying it was too nasty and a great disappointment, because she’d believed I was going to be the next Clive Barker, but had given in to baser instincts and created something I guess they would have called torture-porn a couple of decades later. I was dumped. Just like that. There’s an inherent anger in this book, I see now, that is me, the young man reacting to the world around him, sure, but there’s a huge heart in it, too, and hope.

Thinking about  it now I can remember one of the major contributing factors to the story—we called them the Child Riots, this would be late 91, early 92, I guess, between Meadowell Estate and the fighting that broke out in the West End of the city, up from Benwell and Scotswood, up the Great North Road. I was in a nightclub with my best mate, Karl, and stepped out into a full blown riot. I don’t mind admitting it was the one time in my life I’d been truly terrified. There were hundreds of kids, teens mostly but some as young as ten and eleven, up to their early 20s, hurling petrol bombs, smashing car windows and house windows, burning flats and stuff, and we quite literally stepped out into the middle of it. The image I vividly remember was the fire in the sky turning 2am to bright day, but the wrong kind of light. We lived 12 miles from the riot and somehow had to get out of the city in the middle of it. That event, and those few nights that followed, absolutely shaped the course of The Sufferer’s Song. How could it not? I wanted to write a book about the lack of hope, about the anger inherent in poverty and something about the explosive release. It’s a theme I returned to a couple of years later in Laughing Boy’s Shadow, and this kind of mass violence has always been something that has both fascinated and terrified me.

That’s what The Sufferer’s Song is about in so many ways, a catharsis for me, the kid trapped in the riot, me the kid trapped in the city, me the kid trapped in poverty and that one avenue of hope being the words I was writing. That dogged belief they were going to be my way out.

It’s weird, thirty years on, to read back through it and make the decision to actually do this, to let the story out into the world finally, but there’s part of me that feels like I owe it to the kid I was who lost his agent because of it, who sat on a chair in tears genuinely contemplating suicide because the depression that had swollen up inside me was unbearable, and hope had just been snatched away by a few lines from an agent who didn’t want me anymore. That same part of me sold my computer back then to pay for food, and gave up the dream of ever writing.

The fact this is even possible does my head in to a degree – several years later, finally in a good job, I was able to get the credit to buy a new computer, but the 3.5” Archimedes discs were useless, doubly so because half the book was written on WordPerfect in a Dos Emulation mode within Risc-OS, meaning it was a double layer of operating system embedded on the floppy, and the disc itself had degraded to such a point half of the files on it, when I finally got an emulator for a modern computer capable of reading them, that massive amounts of random symbols and other crap had filtered in, and the file itself now ran over 5,000 pages because of it. I made a decision, because I owed it to that kid, to go through those pages and weed out the gibberish, and rebuild the book, but not to change anything. So what you’re getting here is what I wrote in that period between 1991-93, unvarnished. It’s a time capsule. A glimpse of the writer that I was before I became the writer I am. And I’ll be honest, part of it is because I finally wanted a copy on my shelf, thirty years on, just for me. But it struck me that it might be of interest to folks who have read me, or who loved Steve Harris, Richard Laymon, Shaun Hutson etc, those writers of that era who helped shape this, to discover something ripped straight out of the past and given life.
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It won’t be there forever. I’m letting it out in the world for a month, in celebration of my birthday tomorrow (possibly today as you read this) as a belated present to the younger me. I really hope some people who have a hankering for 90s horror, those old Steve Crisp covers of Headline, and remember Britain as it was back then, enjoy this, because, in a way, it’s all of our lives. We lived these days. We remember.


Steven Savile

 
As a journalist, Kristy French is never going to win a Pulitzer while she's at The Newcastle Gazette covering bake sales and town fêtes. But a missing persons report could be about to change all that.

As a novelist, Ben Shelton's career's over before it's begun, he's the proverbial one hit wonder. The two of them have never met, but they're about to become the most important people in each other's lives. It isn't love. It's survival.

Johnny Lisker and his friend Alex Slater are having a beer in the local a pub after Alex's longtime girlfriend Beth broke his heart. It should be a quiet night. It isn't. Johnny stabs a man. Suddenly, he and Alex are on the run from the law and there's no going back.

Just outside of the village of Westbrooke, disgraced American doctor Brent Richards is obsessed with playing the Devil. He has manufactured a strain of virus he calls N.E.S.T., one that effects the bodies' pain threshold as well as its need for nourishment. The side effects include blisters along the mouth, rapid weight loss - and the insatiable need to feed.

Three people are missing. Murdered. And the death toll is not about to stop rising.

Small towns are meant to be sleepy. Safe. They are not meant to be meat. Within a single week, Kristy, Ben. and Westbrooke's residents have the comfortable safety of their world torn out from under them. People they have known all their lives turn on them and no-one knows what is happening, why, or how to stop it.

There's blood on the streets, and the suffering has only just begun.

Steven Savile has written for Doctor Who, Torchwood, Primeval, Stargate, Warhammer, Slaine, Fireborn, Pathfinder, Arkham Horror, Rogue Angel, and other popular game and comic worlds. He won the International Media Association of Tie-In Writers award for his novel, SHADOW OF THE JAGUAR, and the inaugural Lifeboat to the Stars award for TAU CETI (co-authored with International Bestselling novelist Kevin J. Anderson). Writing as Matt Langley his young adult novel BLACK FLAG was a finalist for the People's Book Prize 2015. His latest books include SHERLOCK HOLMES AND THE MURDER AT SORROWS CROWN and PARALLEL LINES a crime novel from TITAN, as well as GLASS TOWN and COLDFALL WOOD from St Martins Press.