Hub 120 by Various

Author:Various
Format: epub
Tags: Science Fiction, Horror, Fantasy
Publisher: Right Hand Publishing

The Leaping

by Tom Fletcher

Quercus Books

rrp £7.99

reviewed by scott harrison

Can you remember the last time a book scared you? If not ‘scared’ then how about unnerved, or even just plain weirded you out? No? Then you’re probably like me, someone who can watch or read horror without being troubled by the merest hint of creeping gooseflesh, to say nothing of the lack of movement from the hairs at the nape of my neck.

It’s sad really but the only two books that have scared me in any way were Stephen King’s ‘Salem’s Lot, which I first read when I was twelve, and Whitley Strieber’s Communion, which I read at one o’clock in the morning, alone in a tiny attic flat at the top of a very, very old building. Apart from that, nothing. Until now.

There’s something deliciously creepy and wonderfully disturbing woven into every page of The Leaping, the debut novel from horror author Tom Fletcher. It’s so rare nowadays, in this modern climate of awful teen vampire angst-fests and endless zombie splatter books, to find a horror novel so refreshingly simple yet cunningly inventive. If you will excuse the pun, it’s a book with teeth in more ways than one. Reading like some deranged offspring of Irvine Welsh, Fletcher’s prose is so delightfully urbane and simple that sometimes you’d be excused for thinking that you were reading a wittily incisive indictment on post-economic crisis Britain rather than a horror novel. It is a book that concerns itself just as much with the ‘horrors’ of bleak suburban existence than it does with some hulking, shadowy beast roaming the open moorland. Although, rest assured, there is certainly plenty of the latter, by the spade-full. And therein lies the books brilliant ingenuity.

Working at a call centre in Manchester, Jack and his friends feel that they are stuck in a rut. Enduring an endless bombardment of customer abuse and moral-crushing job dissatisfaction, Jack suddenly and unexpectedly finds himself in a blissful romance with co-worker Jennifer. After recently coming into a considerable inheritance Jennifer soon falls for the eerie charms of Fell House, a somewhat large and crumbling building out on the edge of the fells in the Lake District. Thinking that all their troubles are over both Jack and Jennifer quit their jobs and move in just as its original owner is about to return for its property – and it’s brought some friends along for a party.

It’s true that it takes a while for the actual werewolf plotline proper to kick in – some 262 pages to be exact – but such is the build-up of suspense and tension within the first half of the book that when it does come it’s like the first welcome clap of thunder at the end of an oppressively muggy spring day. The second half rattles along at a furious pace, plunging the reader into a fevered miasma of twisted images and halfglimpsed nightmares, blurring the boundaries between dream and reality until the reader is no longer able to discern one from the other.

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