Look Out For… Strange Gateways by Simon Kurt Unsworth
“Strange Gateways looks set to confirm Unsworth’s place at the top table of British horror fiction.”
In this, the third collection of horror fiction from Simon Kurt Unsworth, you will find tales of words that can corrupt a world, of hotels that are not what they seem, of sculptures made at night from cans and bottles that have a meaning we cannot hope to grasp and of a journey to work that becomes a nightmare. These are monsters here and roads down which impossible vehicles travel, and mines and shadows and children made of twine and stitch.
Why we’re excited about this book: Strange Gateways is Simon Kurt Unsworth’s third collection of short stories, following on from Lost Places and Quiet Houses. The author has said that the stories in Strange Gateways are stranger and more ambitious than those he’s written before, which given how good his previous work was is saying something. And we’re especially looking forward to (i.e. already massively unnerved by) the story about “children made of twine and stitch”.
Available in two different editions from PS Publishing, Strange Gateways looks set to confirm Unsworth’s place at the top table of British horror fiction.
Plus, any collection that has a story called ‘F Bomb’ is all right by us.
This book will appeal to: the lost, the quiet, and the strange.
Strange Gateways out now from PS Publishing.
Look Out For… The Night Of The Triffids by Simon Clark
“
Strikes the right balance between Wyndham’s ‘very British apocalypse’ style with the thrills of giant triffids in Manhattan.”
In John Wyndham’s classic best-seller The Day of the Triffids the world has been overwhelmed by killer plants that have blinded almost the entire population. As the novel ends, Wyndham’s narrator scientist Bill Masen is escaping, with his wife and four-year-old son, to the Isle of Wight where a small colony of survivors is holding out. Simon Clark’s sequels picks up the story twenty-five years on.
One morning Bill Masen’s son, David, now grown up, wakes to a world plunged into darkness. Now, the triffids have an advantage over even sighted humanity.
Simon Clark has written an inventive and fast-moving sequel to Wyndham’s story, crafting an elegant and scary tale of humanity’s ongoing fight back against the triffids.
Why we’re excited about this book: Yes, night of the triffids.
It’s fair to say that this type of publication, where a different author writes a sequel to a classic horror novel, doesn’t always result in a great book, but Simon Clark’s follow up to Wyndham Lewis’s Day of The Triffids is an exception. It helps that Clark strikes the right balance between emulating Wyndham’s ‘very British apocalypse’ style and a more modern, faster moving narrative that includes both the thrills of giant triffids in Manhattan and the grimmer realities of what life after society has collapsed would be like.
As well as the book itself, in September there will also be a new Bigfinish audio adaptation of the book, staring Sam Troughton and Nicola Bryant.
This book will appeal to: fans of the original. Which is all of us, right?
Night Of The Triffids is out on the 7 August 2014 from Robinson.
Details about the audio adaptation can be found on the Bigfinish site.
JAMES EVERINGTON
