“A new release by Gary McMahon is always cause for celebration.”
Adam Morris moves into a cheap rental property in the suburbs. He’s divorced and now only sees his daughter, Jessica, every other weekend. He’s a broken man trying to start a new life.
When strange events start to occur in the run-up to Halloween, Adam suspects there’s a link to the old, abandoned house next door.
Soon he learns about a dead killer named Katherine Moffat and the terrible things she did to her victims in the cellar. As Adam uncovers more details regarding past events in the house next door, he realizes that he and Jessica might be in real danger.
Before long, he is caught up in a mortal struggle to prevent the lingering influence of ‘Little Miss Moffat’ from destroying everything he has tried so hard to protect.
This is a story about ghosts, a dead serial killer, and a man struggling to be a good father to his young daughter. This is also a story of pain and pathos, love and hate, abuse, addiction and desire.
It’s also the story of Little Miss Moffat and the Radiant Children ….
Why We’re Excited About This Book: Gary McMahon is a writer who deals with the bleak situations and brutal emotions in his work; in his stories love is often the precursor to something more disturbing. The Bones Of You continues this trend, showing how even the purest emotion–parental love–can lead to pain, guilt and possibly delusion. The book was originally released as a limited edition print of 500 copies but has since been snapped up for a wider release by DarkFuse.
It’s a classic McMahon setup: an emotionally isolated man who lives only for the time he gets to spend with his daughter, moves next door to a house where a serial killer lived. The influence of the killings has lingered and Adam Morris soon finds that there might be real threat… one that he can’t fight with his fists. But how much of what Morris thinks to be happening is real and how much the product of stress and guilt?
A new release by Gary McMahon is always cause for celebration, and The Bones Of You is no exception.
The Bones Of You is out now from DarkFuse.
“Tortured Souls sounds like classic Barker, with his usual obsessions of transformed flesh, sexuality and the border between pain and ecstasy all on display.”
Tortured Souls is one of the most vividly imagined, tightly compressed novellas ever written by the incomparable Clive Barker. At once violent and erotic, brutal and strangely beautiful, it takes us into the heart of the legendary first city known as Primordium, the site of political upheaval, passionate encounters, and astonishing acts of transformation.
Lurking at the edges of this extravagant tale is the ancient entity known as Agonistes, who accepts the pleas of selected Supplicants, transforming them, through a combination of art, magic, and pain, into avatars of violence and revenge.
The story begins when a freelance assassin named Zarles Krieger commits a routine murder-for-hire. This act will lead him to two life-altering encounters, one with the daughter of his victim, the other with Agonistes himself. This conjunction of the human and the inhuman stands at the centre of this instantly absorbing creation.
With great authority and equally great economy, Tortured Souls expands to become a portrait of Primordium itself, with its hierarchies, its hidden mysteries, its shifting power structure, and–most significantly–its indelible cast of characters. A perfectly controlled example of what Barker calls “the fantastique”, Tortured Souls is something truly special, a story whose imaginative reach and sheer narrative power are evident on every page.
Why We’re Excited About This Book: A reissue of one of the stranger releases from Clive Barker’s back catalogue, Tortured Souls was originally published in individual chapters, each of which accompanied an action figure based on one of Barker’s characters. This release collects together all those chapters as a standalone novella about the city Primordium.
Despite its somewhat unusual origins, Tortured Souls sounds like classic Barker, with his usual obsessions of transformed flesh, sexuality and the border between pain and ecstasy all on display. The book builds another one of his distinctive mythologies, telling the story of a character called Agonistes, who was created by an exhausted god on the seventh day, and given strange powers of transformation.
Clive Barker fans are no doubt already looking forward to the release of his new novel The Scarlet Gospels later this year, but in the interim Tortured Souls should provide a welcome appetiser.
Tortured Souls is out on 28 February 2015 from Subterranean Press.
JAMES EVERINGTON