Alien, on a container ship.
‘Scary and unputdownable’, Stephen King
Amongst towering mountains of trash in the backstreets of Lima, three young boys are trying to raise an ancient demon. They don't think their incantation has worked; but that night a teenage drugrunner is gunned down across their makeshift altar. As his killers walk away, his body stirs. Not because it still contains a spark of life. But because something is stirring beneath it...
Port Callao. The MV Lysicrates, a three-quarter-mile long supertanker, is being loaded with hundreds of tonnes of trash. Watching from the bridge, in a bleary state of hungover gloom, is second-in-command Matthew Cotton; more interesting is the arrival of a young American student who has missed the boat she should have been on.
They should have paid more attention to the trash.
With its powerful blend of superb characterisation and demonic horror, Muriel Gray's new novel is her best yet.
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This highly atmospheric tale combines the subtle, allusive prose style of such masters of the past as MR James with a more contemporary emphasis that suggests Clive Barker. In the grim, rubbish-strewn back streets of Lima, three boys are attempting to raise an ancient demon. Their incantations fail (so they think), but on the same night a drug dealer is killed over their impromptu altar. And anyone who has ever watched a Hammer film will know what effect the shedding of blood has on dormant monsters. Gray then relocates her narrative to the massive supertanker, Lysicrates, where the beleaguered second-in-command Matthew Cotton is intrigued by the arrival of a young American student. Soon, both are involved in the horror that came aboard with the hundreds of pounds of rubbish that the ship is carrying. Much carnage ensues before a decisive final confrontation.
Muriel Gray's particular achievement in The Ancient is to reinvigorate a genre suffering from chronic overload. Her supernatural menace may be nothing out of the ordinary, but she surrounds it with such a world of persuasively grim detail and (most importantly) well-rounded characters that the reader is comprehensively gripped.--Barry Forshaw
From the reviews of The Trickster and Furnace:
'The Trickster is written with incredible vigour... thuggish, gory, sentimental, cosy. It grips'
Daily Mail
'Gray tells her tale with immense elan. A smashing debut that's gutsier than most authors could ever be' Time Out
'Pacy, energetic, violent entertainment whose flashes of intuition and glittery neurosis give it an idiosyncratic edge' The Times
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