Scavenger Summer

I frequently say I haven't written a horror story in a long time, though a few reviewers did catch on that Glass Town was basically a horror novel that slipped through the ranks at St Martins and made it out into the world (and if you hang around long enough those last few hcs should hit the remainder bin soon so you can get it for a buck) but a post on facebook about missing writing horror led to a British small press, Horrific Tales, asking me to do a proper horror story for them. It ended up taking nearly as long to write Scavenger Summer (33,000 words) as it took to write White Peak, the new St Martins thriller... I'm not sure what that says, apart from maybe I'm a long way removed from the genre these days and struggled more than I would have even ten years ago when I wrote Shiftling... (which will always be One Summer to me haha) ...

It's an 80s set coming of age horror, which the editor just described as an 'absolute headfuck' - which I'm taking as a good thing haha

Anyway, I thought I'd share the opening line...

I was fifteen when I found my mother’s body washed up on the beach.