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In the brilliant red doom of a Hampshire Sunset Brigit Conti can
hear a voice behind her ears that is not her own. Bed-bound, and
complaining of a rare bone disease that no Doctor can diagnose, her
husband fears that the house they have purchased is a portal
through which an older, more malign energy has passed, possessing
his wife and son. Through their successive deterioration his
secular and agnostic world-view undergoes a metamorphosis, drawing
him to a strange man from the hills: the Rector, their unlikely
saviour. Or are he and his family merely victims of their own
self-serving yuppie way of life? "You Were The Picture of Contented
New Wealth" is a gothic tragedy set in the nineteen eighties,
bringing proper characterisation and a literary sensibility to the
traditional horror story. It's mix of generic elements and mystical
realism deal with the irreducibility of evil and its successful
normalisation in to our daily and dominant reality.
"I don't have any heroes, they're all useless", opined John Lydon
in 1976. As a spokesperson of sorts for the punk generation, Lydon
was giving voice to a nihilistic, deconstructive impulse which, for
better or worse, would go on to dominate the next half-century or
so of intellectual, cultural and political life. But isn't one of
the problems with the modern world that we no longer have any real
sense of what heroism is? What if we recovered heroism from the
hands of the fascists and the neoliberal ideologues, and proclaimed
that - despite everything - a hero can and should be something to
be? In these personal, provocative essays, the authors behind the
uncompromising project that is Repeater Books come together to
redefine the idea of the hero for a twenty-first-century public
which desperately needs something to believe in. From Eric Cantona
to Wile E Coyote, Bruno Latour to Paula Rego, forgotten legends and
anonymous family members, this compendium of extraordinary human
behaviour is essential reading for anyone who has ever thought
that, despite what Jean-Paul Sartre said, heaven is other people.
"I always wanted to be a writer, but I became a policeman instead."
WESSEX, 2016. Teenagers are vanishing off the council estates of a
small provincial city. A crop of herbs that are said to posses
magical powers which only grow once every fifty years are found in
the woods. A supernatural creature believed to be the guardian of
the herbs is seen in nightmares. Rumours of orgiastic rituals on
the estates of the rich and powerful excite the curious. And the
Queen of England decides to celebrate her 90th birthday with a
visit to the city's famous cathedral spire. Into this madness, two
ambitious detectives, one with doomed literary ambitions, seek to
solve the mystery, their only lead that "posh people are taking our
children". Blending mysticism, class war, societal malfeasance and
transcendence, High John The Conqueror identifies the point in our
recent history when the ghosts of our past become the political
monsters of the present.
A selection of Repeater authors choose their favourite horror
stories for this new anthology, with each writing a critical
introduction for the story of their choice. Edited by novelist and
Repeater publisher Tariq Goddard and "horror philosopher" Eugene
Thacker, The Repeater Book of the Occult is a new anthology of
horror stories that explores the ever-shifting boundaries between
the natural and supernatural, between the real and the unreal. As
the editors note, "In the grey zone between what appears and what
is, lies horror. But horror writing is also a certain disposition,
a way of thinking based on a suspicion regarding the world as it is
given to us, and a doubt regarding the accepted ways of explaining
that world to us - and for us." The Repeater Book of the Occult
includes introductions by Repeater authors such as Leila Taylor,
Carl Neville, Rhian E Jones, and Elvia Wilk, and features horror
classics by Algernon Blackwood, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and Edgar
Allan Poe, as well as forgotten gems by authors such as W.W.
Jacobs, Mark Twain, and Sheridan Le Fanu.
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