Review: Gallows at Twilight by William Hussey

This is the second book in William Hussey’s Witchfinder trilogy and in now characteristic style it opens with a horrifying tale of child sacrifice, plus one of those memorable images that Hussey conjures so easily. In the first novel it was the exploding poisonous toads. This time it is the sacrificed children’s fingers and toes that have been ‘laid out like a row of little sausages’!

Once again Jake Harker is the only thing that stands between the Demon Father and the annihilation of mankind and at the beginning of the book he is in no fit state to fulfil that task. The magic that he found at the end of the first book seems to have left him and although he now has an odd assortment of monsters, friends and his dad on his side, they are no match for the Demon Father and his father appears to be dying. To make matters worse, the girl he’s started to fall in love with, Rachel, appears to be sweet on his best friend, Simon.

So in a teenage pique fuelled quest to re-find his magic, cure his dying father and put a stop to the Demon Father’s plans, he plunges back through time to the seventeenth century, which is where matters start to get seriously dangerous for him.

As with the first book, this is another page turner, packed full of action, horror and a cast of some of the creepiest characters you will find in fiction. There is also a light touch at play: the Badderson father and son combo, for example, are quite adorable, for all that they are trolls, and I became rather fond of the many-armed Pandora. The domestic scenes with the Hobarron family in the seventeeth century are handled with great delicacy too. Will this make the book more acceptable to girls? Probably not unless they like stomach-churning gore as well. But it does make for a more rounded book and a lot more to think about.

And one final warning: the cover. This is definitely not a book to be left face up on the bedside table!

The last book in the series, The Last Nightfall, is due out in September.

The lovely people at Oxford sent me this review copy. If you want one for yourself please order it via the link below and Amazon will make a small contribution to maintaining this blog.
 

OUP Dark Fantasy Event

On the evening of Wednesday 27^th October Oxford University Press hosted a Dark Fantasy event in The Drawing Room of the House of St Barnabas in Soho. The purple uplighting, chandeliers, and mirrors of the room were complemented by a liberal scattering of carved pumpkins, not to mention a furry spider and a rather wonderful Venetian mask. Where better to gather for an evening of literary chat and spooky readings?

William Hussey, complete with large and distinctly hirsute spider adorning his left shoulder, opened the readings with an excerpt from Gallows at Twilight, the second book of his Witchfinder trilogy, out on 6^th January 2011. His relish in describing the Crowden sisters feasting on children reassured us that the stomach churning gore and shudder fest of the first book will be continuing in the second, right down to something he tantalisingly described as the ‘infamous shopping-bag line’!

Rhiannon Lassiter came next with a reading from Ghost of a Chance, also out on 6^th January. Rhiannon came to the event with a large supporting cast, including her august mother, Mary Hoffman, sporting the be-feathered mask previously mentioned.  Rhiannon came to dark teen fantasy via science fiction, magic realism and thrillers and it was clear that all had played a role in shaping this book. There were shudders aplenty in this reading: definitely not one for the faint-hearted.

Joss Stirling completed the evening’s readings, with an excerpt from Finding Sky, her first novel in this persona  and published earlier in October. Dressed in a sparkly black dress she more than looked the part and opened her talk with a brief discussion of her theory that the English are prone to periodic bursts of the gothic (or should that be gothick given the historical nature of the discussion?)  The book was written with a very specific teenage girl audience in mind, and several had come along to the event to vouchsafe their approval.  The reading gave more than a glimpse of the nature of the book: psycho-horror underpinned by the humour inherent in an Anglo-American culture clash. Sadly we didn’t get a glimpse of what Joss described as her deep hatred of Las Vegas in the reading but I am assured that we will find it in the novel!

This was an exhilarating event that gave a suitably murky teaser to some very dark books.

Review: Witchfinder: Dawn of the Demontide by William Hussey

A year ago a new editor joined Oxford University Press. She was young, energetic, full of enthusiasm and on the lookout for the first book which she could fall in love with. Then along came Dawn of the Demontide and she was smitten.

And now I’ve read it, I know why.

The story opens with a human sacrifice. A boy, Luke, is dragged, screaming, from his bed, across a rocky beach to Crowden’s Sorrow. His pyjamas are torn, he is soaked through with rain and shivering with fear, and hooded adults, whose voices he recognises as friends and neighbours, pull back his head and slit his throat.
And that, pretty much, sets the tone for the rest of the book.
Luke was sacrificed, we learn, to ensure that hoards of demons cannot break through the door in the cavern known as Crowden’s Sorrow. Twenty five years later the door is threatening to open once more and an almighty battle breaks out between the guardians of the door, the Hobarron elders, and Crowden’s coven, a band of witches dedicated to the release of the demons. And at the centre of the maelstrom is Jake Harker, a fifteen year old loner and horror comic fanatic.
This is a real page turner. It’s fast paced and full of action and it’s one of the creepiest books I’ve read in a long while: Jake Harker wasn’t the only one having weird dreams, I can tell you! It’s full of well-rounded characters and a cast of evil creatures to make your stomach churn (the exploding poisonous toads that rain down on Hobarron village are truly disgusting). Adults are generally untrustworthy, and some of the children are no better, and Jake is faced with impossible odds if he is going to avoid the inevitable and bloody end.
It has to be a must for all horror fans. And if you want more, there are two more books Gallows at Twilight and The Last Nightfall due out in January and September of next year. In the meantime the website http://www.witchfinderbooks.co.uk/ is well worth checking out. There’s a reading by the author and a competition to win signed copies (closes 1^st July 2010).
Witchfinder: Dawn of the Demontide, out March 2010.