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Summary
Summary
An ancient evil lurks just beneath the surface of our world in this splendidly dark horror tale inspired by ancient folklore, history, and mythology.
A decade ago, teacher Nathan Brookes saw four of his students walk up a hill and vanish. Only one returned--Olivia--starved, terrified, and with no memory of where she'd been. Questioned by the police but released for lack of evidence, Nathan spent the years trying to forget.
When a body is found in the same ancient woodland where they disappeared, it is first believed to be one of the missing children, but is soon identified as a Bronze Age warrior, nothing more than an archaeological curiosity. Yet Nathan starts to have horrific visions of the students, alive but trapped. Then Olivia reappears, desperate that the warrior's body be returned to the earth. For he is the only thing keeping a terrible evil at bay . . .
Author Notes
James Brogden is the author of The Narrows, Tourmaline and The Realt . His horror and fantasy stories have appeared in anthologies and periodicals ranging from The Big Issue to the British Fantasy Society Award-winning Alchemy Press . He spent many years living in Australia, but now lives in Bromsgrove, Worcestershire with his wife and two daughters.
Reviews (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
The past is not dead in this time-looped horror tale that tries to elevate the mundane to the legendary but only succeeds in making it tragic. Nine years after three high school students disappeared on a hike, mummified human remains are discovered in the same park. Nathan Brookes, the teacher who chaperoned the missing students, returns to the site to encounter a puzzled archaeologist. Dating the corpse indicates it is 3,000 years old, but it also shows a modern surgical repair. And Nathan has a vision of Bark Foot, a local legend whose description matches the mummy. When Sue, the only student to return from the hike, kidnaps the archaeologist and goes off to meet Bark Foot, Nathan decides to follow her trail, no matter how far into myth it seems to lead. Brogden presents a believable set of characters all struggling to deal with the unforeseen and their own desires. Unfortunately, the central tragedy that twists the plot lacks the grand passion or obsession that would believably warp history into horror. (Mar.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Guardian Review
Chalk by Paul Cornell, The Ninth Rain by Jen Williams, Slow Bullets by Alastair Reynolds, Relics by Tim Lebbon and Hekla's Children by James Brogden Early in Paul Cornell's psychological horror novel Chalk (Tor, [pound]14.50), something appalling happens to Andrew Waggoner, a mild-mannered schoolboy who suffers continual bullying. After a Halloween disco he's attacked by five fellow pupils who drag him into nearby woods, tie him to a tree and mutilate him. Later that night, his tortured psyche gives birth to a Hyde-like alter ego that proceeds to do terrible things; as he tells Andrew: "You can only be healed when your revenge is complete." What follows, seen through the eyes of the book's unreliable narrator, is the story of Waggoner's revenge. The setting is the West Country in the 1980s, and Cornell brilliantly delineates not only the insular milieu of rural England but the brutal materialism of Thatcher's Britain, in a slow-building novel of retribution and cycles of abuse. Cornell has described Chalk as not being about the triumph of a victimised martyr but about "how the bullied often become the bullies, and a desperate attempt to escape that". Superb. Jen Williams's fourth novel proves that, with sufficient literary flair and psychological insight, even the corpse of a subgenre as moribund as heroic fantasy can be brought back from the dead. The Ninth Rain (Headline, [pound]14.99) is far more than the sum of its cliched parts, which include a fallen empire, a quest, monsters, magic and three disparate characters thrown together by fate. These are the ebullient adventurer Lady Vincenza de Grazon, searching for ancient artefacts; Noon, a naive witch on the run from the powers-that-be for the crime of possessing supernatural ability; and Tormalin the Oathless, a crass but caring mercenary more than a little handy with a sword. Williams portrays her characters as flawed but humane, propels the plot with expert pace, and excels at eldritch world-building. Alastair Reynolds' short novel Slow Bullets (Gollancz, [pound]12.99) packs a lot into its 182 pages: far-future warfare, a slowly failing starship and a complex first-person narrator, all wrapped up in a thoughtful, fast-paced plot. Scur is a soldier fighting for the Peripheral Systems in the long war against the Central Worlds. When the war ends, she is captured by an opponent who tortures her and leaves her for dead. Awakening much later, she finds herself aboard the "skipship" Caprice, taking war criminals to the planet of Tottori. But a "skip" that should have taken months has thrust the Caprice hundreds of years into the future, and Scur and her fellow prisoners are stranded on the malfunctioning starship. When she finds that her torturer is also aboard the ship, the scene is set for a rousing drama of revenge -- which, in a moving finale, Reynolds subverts with a wonderfully compassionate resolution. Vince and Angela, in Relics by Tim Lebbon (Titan Books, [pound]7.99), are just a typical liberal urban couple, she a US academic whose specialism is criminology, he a dealer in the arcane. But just how arcane is the question that drives this slow-burning, atmospheric horror-thriller set in contemporary London. Vince buys and sells the relics of creatures thought to be mythical, and when he goes missing, leaving Angela a cryptic note ("Sorry. Love you. Goodbye"), she uses her knowledge of crime and her contacts in the London underworld in an attempt to find him. On the way, she makes the acquaintance of sadistic gang boss Frederick Meloy and finds herself accused of multiple murder. Lebbon is a master of drip-feeding horror and suspense, and in Angela and Vince he has created a believable couple whose complex entanglement with forces far greater than themselves propels the reader towards a startling climax. What must be every teacher's nightmare comes true in James Brogden's fourth novel, Hekla's Children (Titan, [pound]7.99). When Nathan Brookes supervises a school trip to a west Midlands nature reserve, four of his pupils vanish -- only for one of them to turn up the following day, hysterical and with no memory of what happened to her or her friends. Ten years later, Brookes -- ravaged by self-pity and guilt and no longer a teacher -- suffers nightmare visions of the lost trio after the mummified body of a bronze age warrior is discovered close to where they vanished. Alarmingly, the body appears to have undergone the same orthopaedic surgery procedure as had one of the missing boys. When the surviving pupil persuades archaeologists that the body must be reburied to save the world from a bronze age monster known as Afaugh, Brookes finds himself in a life-or-death battle of redemption. Brogden has crafted a visceral, seat-of-the-pants thriller that successfully shuttles between a dark and terrifying bronze age and contemporary Britain. *Eric Brown's latest book is Microcosms (Infinity Plus). - Eric Brown.
Kirkus Review
When a vicious, ancient evil is loosed upon the Earth, a motley crew must band together to halt its murderous rampage and return it to its prison.Ten years ago, Nathan Brookes led a group of teenagers on a hike through Sutton Park in the Midlands, and four of them disappeared. One girl, Olivia Crawford, turned up the next day, confused and in shock. Nathan has blamed himself for the incident ever since, and when mummified remains are found in a peat bog near the site, old wounds are reopened. Osteoarchaeologist Dr. Tara Doumani is called upon to examine the mummy, dubbed the Rowton Man, and he's thousands of years old, but shockingly, one of his legs seems to belong to one of the boys who disappeared. Olivia, in desperation, kidnaps Tara to convince her to rebury the Rowton Man, and soon Nathan, Tara, and his old flame Sue Vickers are thrown together. An evil being called the afaugh (who can take over people's bodies) has been released by the mummy's exhumation, and it's very, very hungry. Olivia reveals that the group was taken by a man called Bark Foot to the in-between world called Un, and Nathan realizes he must travel to Un and stop the events set in motion 10 years ago. Un, moored in the Bronze Age, is a brutal world shaped by imagination and mood and steeped in myth and legend. Nathan must return the afaugh to its prison, even if he dies trying. Although Nathan seems to be the focus at first, it's Catharine "Scattie" Powell, who has made her own way in Un, who gives the story its heart and soul. The afaugh's rampage through the modern world is genuinely scary, and the race to stop it will keep readers enthralled. Brogden's U.S. debut is a wonderfully odd mix of dark Bronze Age fantasy and modern-day thriller, and it works. An exciting and bloody read with teeth. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* A teacher takes a group of teens into a rugged British park to practice their survival skills, but after stopping at a spring off-trail, the children vanish into thin air. Only one returns, but with no memory of what has happened. The plot thickens nearly a decade later, as bones are discovered in the same park. But these bones are mummified and date back to the Bronze Age. Are the two events connected? This land was home to an ancient people, the Un, who had been victimized by a horrific monster, the Afaugh. The Un captured the monster and set up a system to forever guard the world from his terrifying influence, but when the bones are excavated in modern times, the Un's hold on the Afaugh is weakened. The engrossing plot features steadily intensifying dread, a diverse cast of characters, and expert world building. Brogden takes readers on a fast-paced and terrifying ride as everyone tries to solve two mysteries, one modern and one ancient, but both with strong ties to a supernatural evil. This is a horror novel and a standout thriller that can hold its own against the best in either genre today. Give to readers looking for tales of ancient evil like those by Graham Masterton or Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child.--Spratford, Becky Copyright 2017 Booklist