Look Out For… Blood Crazy by Simon Clark
“A wonderfully written, thought-provoking, and very dark novel.”
It is a quiet, uneventful Saturday in Doncaster. Nick Aten, and his best friend Steve Price – troubled seventeen year olds – spend it as usual hanging around the sleepy town, eating fast food and planning their revenge on Tug Slatter, a local bully and their arch-enemy. But by Sunday, Tug Slatter becomes the last of their worries because somehow overnight civilization is in ruins. Adults have become murderously insane – literally. They’re infected with an uncontrollable urge to kill the young. Including their own children. As Nick and Steve try to escape the deadly town covered with the mutilated bodies of kids, a group of blood-thirsty adults ambushes them. Just a day before they were caring parents and concerned teachers, today they are savages destroying the future generation. Will Nick and Steve manage to escape? Is their hope that outside the Doncaster borders the world is ‘normal’ just a childish dream?
Why We’re Excited About This Book: A very welcome reissue of Simon Clark’s classic apocalyptic horror novel from 1995, Blood Crazy. It’s a story about two teenagers attempting to survive and understand a very unusual apocalypse – overnight, every adult in the world has been overcome with a murderous desire to kill young people. It’s a setup somewhat similar to James Tiptree Jr.’s ‘The Screwfly Solution’ (in which men become similarly murderous towards women) and as deeply disturbing in its implications. The other obvious comparison here is The Lord Of The Flies, as bands of survivors of the adults’ violence develop their own fault-lines and explanations of what has occurred.
Simon Clark has ended the world in books other than Blood Crazy, but this wonderfully written, thought-provoking, and very dark novel might just be his apocalyptic masterpiece. Here’s hoping the next time he features in Look Out For… it’s with a sequel.
This Book Will Appeal To: readers looking for a very different end of world experience.
Blood Crazy is out now from Bloomsbury.
Look Out For… Haunted
“An anthology inspired by the classic, slow-burn ghost stories of the past.”
Spirits walk among us…
Ghosts can be found truly anywhere. It might be the quaint but abandoned village of Snap End, in the heart of the English countryside, or the beautiful but dilapidated Canterbrem home in rural Texas. Perhaps you’ll find these supernatural visitors in the heart of a suburban estate, or running through the forests of Muskogee country. Or maybe, just maybe, they’ll come strolling into your own home…
Prepare yourself for five unique visitations in Haunted, where the dead return may return with a desire for revenge or the simple wish to continue making our lives better…
Why We’re Excited About This Book: Boo Books are a relatively new genre publisher based in the East Midlands; of likely interest to This Is Horror readers are the haunted cinema novel The Electric by David Barker, and this new multi-author anthology of ghost stories, Haunted.
Haunted features stories from Paul Melhuish, Amanda Bigler, Martin Cosby, Michael Bracken and Kevlin Henney. It’s available only as a limited edition, so you might want to move fast. An anthology inspired by the classic, slow-burn ghost stories of the past, with a suitably wintery cover image, Haunted is the ideal book to read as the nights draw in, in front of an open fire and with a glass of port. Just don’t let the faint noises at the window disturb you; it must just be the trees in the wind…
This Book Will Appeal To: readers looking for something new after they’ve reread their M.R. James collections yet again.
Haunted is out now from Boo Books.
JAMES EVERINGTON
