Gary McMahon - Beyond Here Lies Nothing

All the survivors of what happened a year ago were relocated. Many of them sold their stories to newspapers and magazines and appeared on TV chat shows and documentaries. Handheld footage from mobile phones appeared on YouTube. Blurred digital photographs were reproduced in newspapers and magazines around the world. Over the last twelve months so much has been said and written about those events in the Concrete Grove that sometimes he feels like it’s a fiction — and he is merely a character in a book that’s still being written, or has yet to be written.

Some of those survivors are dying. The official verdict is that it’s a form of cancer, but he isn’t so sure. He’s heard rumours of tumours formed on the skin like bunches of black leaves. Of bones transforming into what seem to be blackened twigs and branches and breaking through the flesh.

Whatever this is, it isn’t over. In fact, it might have just begun…

He thinks of the dead and what he owes them.

Most of all, he remembers Erik Best and Marc Price — who still has not been found.

And he thinks of Abby Hansen and how she now protects the ageless Gone Away Girls, taking care of them in an old orphanage up in Scotland, where the press and the public cannot touch them. He thinks fondly of the Girls themselves, and how they never age, never speak of what they have seen and done. They just sit there, staring patiently into the distance, as if they are waiting for something.

There are so many unanswered questions. A new world order is waiting to slide into place. Mankind can no longer feign ignorance of the numinous.

Perhaps one day the answers to all questions will be found beyond those thick, high walls — one of the regular expedition groups might even find something of use in that dense primeval land.

Whenever he drives back home from these nocturnal visits, usually with the first faint rays of the sun kissing the horizon, he returns to bed and holds his wife. He hangs on to her as if she is a lifeline. He doesn’t want to ever let go.

Every once in a while she mumbles something in her sleep: a word that he thinks sounds a lot like their daughter’s name. They called their baby Hope, because that’s what she represents.

He kisses his wife’s shoulder, her neck, and then whispers secret, wordless promises into her ear as she sleeps.

And he waits quietly for the darkness to pass.

IT KNOWS WHERE YOU LIVE…

Imagine a place where all your nightmares become real. Dark urban streets where crime, debt and violence are not the only things to fear. Picture a housing project that is a gateway to somewhere else; a realm where ghosts and monsters stir hungrily in the shadows. Welcome to the Concrete Grove.

This deprived area is Hailey’s new home, but when an ancient entity notices her, it becomes something much more threatening. She is the only one who can help her mother as she joins in a dangerous dance with loanshark Monty Bright. Only Hailey can see the truth of Tom’s darkest desires as he tries to become part of their family. And only Hailey can lead them all to the heart of the estate where something older than this land stirs and begins to wake…

‘ The Concrete Grove is McMahon’s most accomplished work to date. A compelling novel of extremes.’

‘There’s a new wave of brilliant horror writers, and McMahon’s right there at the top of them.’

‘McMahon’s visionary sense of the supernatural makes The Concrete Grove one exciting read.’

IT’S CALLING YOU BACK…

Twenty years ago, three boys staggered out of an old building. Missing for a weekend, the boys had no idea where they’d been, but they all shared the same vague memory of a shadowed woodland grove. Now, Simon has returned to the Concrete Grove to see his old friends and unearth painful childhood memories, and things once buried are beginning to claw their way back to the surface.

The hummingbirds are flying again. Nightmares made manifest walk the streets. A dark entity is calling from the shadows, reaching out to three terrified boys who have grown into damaged men. And the past is about to catch up with them all, staining their lives with a darkness they never truly escaped.

Silent Voices is the terrifying follow-up to McMahon’s award-winning The Concrete Grove .

‘There’s a new wave of brilliant horror writers — and McMahon’s right there at the top of them.’

‘Gary McMahon is one of the finest of a new breed of horror writers.’

‘The outstanding British horror writer of our times.’

HOME IS WHERE THE HORROR IS…

The tread on the landing outside the door when you know you are the only one in the house. The wind whistling through the eves, carrying the voices of the dead. The figure glimpsed briefly through the cracked window of a derelict house.

Critically-acclaimed editor Jonathan Oliver brings horror home with a collection of haunted house stories by Lisa Tuttle, Stephen Volk, Terry Lamsley, Adam L. G. Nevill, Weston Ochse, Rebecca Levene, Garry Kilworth, Chaz Brenchley, Robert Shearman, Nina Allan, Christopher Fowler, Sarah Pinborough, Paul Meloy, Christopher Priest, Jonathan Green, Nicholas Royle, Eric Bown, Tim Lebbon and Joe R. Lansdale.

“Jonathan Oliver is the hottest new horror editor to come out of the UK since Stephen Jones, and I have high hopes for House of Fear .”

Imagine there was a supernatural chiller that Hammer Films never made. A grand epic produced at the studio’s peak, which played like a cross between the Dracula and Frankenstein films and Dr Terror’s House Of Horrors…

Four passengers meet on a train journey through Eastern Europe during the First World War, and face a mystery that must be solved if they are to survive. As the ‘Arkangel’ races through the war-torn countryside, they must find out:

What is in the casket that everyone is so afraid of? What is the tragic secret of the veiled Red Countess who travels with them? Why is their fellow passenger the army brigadier so feared by his own men? And what exactly is the devilish secret of the Arkangel itself?