Look Out For… … Finders Keepers by Stephen King

“A taut and masterful thriller.”

‘Wake up, genius.’ So begins King’s instantly riveting story about a vengeful reader. The genius is John Rothstein, a Salinger-like icon who created a famous character, Jimmy Gold, but who hasn’t published a book for decades. Morris Bellamy is livid, not just because Rothstein has stopped providing books, but because the nonconformist Jimmy Gold has sold out for a career in advertising. Morris kills Rothstein and empties his safe of cash, yes, but the real treasure is a trove of notebooks containing at least one more Gold novel.

Morris hides the money and the notebooks, and then he is locked away for another crime. Decades later, a boy named Pete Saubers finds the treasure, and now it is Pete and his family that Bill Hodges, Holly Gibney, and Jerome Robinson must rescue from the ever-more deranged and vengeful Morris when he’s released from prison after thirty-five years.

Why We’re Excited About This Book:

There’s an old piece of advice that authors shouldn’t write books about writing or writers… and it’s one that Stephen King has fruitfully ignored throughout his career. In works like Misery, The Dark Half and ‘Secret Window, Secret Garden’ (in Four Past Midnight) King has explored the relationship between fiction and reality, reader and writer in a way few other authors would dare tackle.

Finders Keepers returns to an idea King explored in Misery, that of the obsessive fan: specifically one Morris Bellamy, a disgruntled reader of author John Rothstein’s work. But unlike Paul Sheldon, Rothstein is killed early on, and the real story in Finders Keepers concerns the manuscript of a Rothstein novel that Bellamy buries before he is imprisoned for his crime, and what happens when Bellamy is released and tries to find it…

Finders Keepers is a sequel last year’s Mr Mercedes  and readers are recommended to read that book first, if you haven’t already. A third volume in the series, The Suicide Prince, is due next year. As ever, King delivers a taut and masterful thriller full of irony and skilful characterisation. Fifty four novels into his career, and there’s still very few other writers who can match him.

Finders Keepers is available now from Hodder & Stoughton.

Look Out For … A Head Full Of Ghosts by Paul Tremblay

“A very modern horror story, masterfully told.”

The lives of the Barretts, a normal suburban New England family, are torn apart when fourteen-year-old Marjorie begins to display signs of acute schizophrenia.

To her parents’ despair, the doctors are unable to stop Marjorie’s descent into madness. As their stable home devolves into a house of horrors, they reluctantly turn to a local Catholic priest for help. Father Wanderly suggests an exorcism; he believes the vulnerable teenager is the victim of demonic possession. He also contacts a production company that is eager to document the Barretts’ plight. With John, Marjorie’s father, out of work for more than a year and the medical bills looming, the family agrees to be filmed, and soon find themselves the unwitting stars of The Possession, a hit reality television show. When events in the Barrett household explode in tragedy, the show and the shocking incidents it captures become the stuff of urban legend.

Fifteen years later, a bestselling writer interviews Marjorie’s younger sister, Merry. As she recalls those long ago events that took place when she was just eight years old, long-buried secrets and painful memories that clash with what was broadcast on television begin to surface—and a mind-bending tale of psychological horror is unleashed, raising vexing questions about memory and reality, science and religion, and the very nature of evil.

Why We’re Excited About This Book:

Paul Tremblay’s novel A Head Full Of Ghosts mixes traditional horror tropes with the modern day stuff of the reality TV show. Rachel Neville is researching the TV program The Possession, which purported to show a real case of demonic possession in the house of the Barrett family, before descending into tragedy and becoming an urban legend. But interviewing the girl who was supposedly possessed fifteen years earlier reveals new facts that don’t tally with what was originally broadcast, and the reader is plunged into a tale of shifting viewpoints and ambiguity.

Revitalising elements from such classics as The Haunting Of Hill House and House Of Leaves, A Head Full Of Ghosts is a very modern horror story, masterfully told. But it’s more than this, being a thoughtful and riveting exploration of American society and the relationship between siblings. A potential modern classic, you don’t want to miss this one.

A Head Full Of Ghosts is out now from William Morrow & Company.

JAMES EVERINGTON