Five twisted tales of the uncanny: from the acid-fried occult satire of ‘Gwydion’s Dawn’, to the bizarre rites and dark deception of seventeenth-century Devon in ‘The Cleft Owl’; a trip into disorientation in ‘3:05 am’, to the vengeful malignance of ‘Old Crotchet’, all are as distinctly odd, and unsettling, as the seemingly innocuous guide in ‘Agnes of Grimstone Peverell’.
The comedy is black, and the protagonists all too unawares of the sinister forces that lurk beneath the fragile veneer of the everyday world; shifting and malevolent, they are there to be seen, and sensed, if the characters should but care to look, yet more often than not, they do not. The forces of the irrational, the supernatural and the paranormal bide their time, waiting to irrupt through the divide and come crashing into the present, with a vividness as unwelcome as it is unexpected.
The horror that you will encounter between these covers is of the understated variety; it is often implied and psychological, rather than being of the type favoured by the exponents of the slasher genre, and with the exception of ‘The Cleft Owl’, there is as much humour as there is unease.
Unconstrained by the bounds of any single genre, amongst these tales you will find much to engage your interest should you possess a taste for mysteries, the paranormal, ghost stories, the occult, psychological horror, historical fiction and satire. Come! Old Crotchet awaits you.
