Posted on

Reading: The Claustrophile

Reading the opening passages of my new novel, The Claustrophile.

THE CLAUSTROPHILE is  the story of a 1998 British found footage horror film with a fearsome occult reputation, that may well not be a film at all but a first-hand record of a descent into terror and revelation deep beneath England’s remotest location.

Lovecraft, Mark Z Danielewski and Jules Verne echo through this uncanny English underworld. Cut with mordant comedy and pure fear, The Claustrophile is a creepfest where Blair Witch Project meets Journey to the Centre of the Earth.

‘The lone hawthorn ahead is the same iconic tree that appears in both films, so now I know I did not murder you.’

Descender98 has been obsessed with The Claustrophile film ever since Zanna, object of his unrequited love, vanished while they watched it and he was suspected of murdering her. The other members of the viewing party, like most people who see the film, soon die or disappear, too. Twenty-five years later, Descender believes he has been sent co-ordinates by Zanna that lead him to discover the film’s setting, the Crocell, a vast network of bunkers, caves and catacombs rumoured in Medieval legend to extend to Hell itself. Guided by the original film, the journey taken by the doomed ‘Snyder Party’, Descender embarks on an increasingly fraught rescue mission, lost in the dark, crushed by traps and mazes, beset by evidence of a grand, weird and possibly cosmic plan, with no way back and in tight spaces hunted by the Claustrophile, a carnivorous entity made of roots, all the while getting nearer and nearer to solving the mystery of not just where he is, but who he is.

All rights available: contact John Baker at BLM.

Posted on

Reading: Dirty Boy

Reading from my  new novella Dirty Boy.

 

 

DIRTY BOY is the story of the strange and alarming case of the Hardmoor Gimp. To some, this notorious nightcreeper is no more than a merry prankster, but to others, he’s a dangerous freak or even an entity from the occult past back to claim what it once was promised.

Lovecraft, Aickman and Kurt Vonnegut jostle in this grotesque English netherworld. Alive with black comedy, formal invention and sheer horror, Dirty Boy is a dark romp where Night of the Demon meets Scarfolk.

You are now reading DIRTY BOY, the manuscript you just found stashed inside a chest freezer in the burnt-out sex dungeon.

When the Hardmoor Gimp returns after a year’s absence, this time jumping out at shy and straight-laced Emily Quy, the town explodes in a storm of speculation that intensifies when the Gimp goes on to stalk Emily, a woman not yet reconciled to the recent disappearance of her fiancé. When the Gimp appears to kidnap Emily, Hardmoor detectives Herbie and Linh interview Emily’s lodger, Amira, a young woman who has recently developed a new, outrageous personality, and Amira’s sort-of-boyfriend, Jaap Visser, a Dutch roofer whose missing boss is one of several compelling Gimp suspects. A storm of conspiracy, occult scaremongering, rumours of medieval curses, intemperate online feuding, ranting and raving erupts when Emily’s clothes are found at Lake Mott, a place of black legend. All of Hardmoor is then swept up in the quest to find Emily and unmask the Gimp, especially you, you being someone who may or may not have found yourself far too involved in and stirred up by the strange and alarming case of the Hardmoor Gimp. Perhaps, after all, your soul is its object of desire, it is you that it wants.

‘This is a staggering work, and I am finding it difficult to believe that I just read a story quite like this one, almost as if it has sent me mad.’  Des Lewis, The Gesalt-Real Time Review of Books.

Trade enquiries: contact John Baker at BLM.