Jeremy Page: ‘Pale Winter Light’

Description

“Jeremy Page writes with feeling and intimacy. Whether he is describing wind, storm, mountain light or the rotten tang of estuarine mud, the charge of a stallion or the settling of a butterfly, his touch is poetic and sure.” — The Guardian

Amid the garish lights of a Yarmouth hen-do, death stalks.

A watermill hiding a terrible secret insidiously pollutes the lives of those renovating it.

As the tide retreats at dawn, a fisherman overstays his welcome to witness a horrifying vision.

A father struggles to accept the reality of a spectre haunting his riverside home, bringing a black malignancy on the breeze.

In this collection of fourteen strange stories, Jeremy Page (award-winning author of the highly acclaimed, Norfolk-based Salt) conjures terrors both real and imagined. Pale Winter Light sees Page return once more to the flatlands of East Anglia, vividly breathing life into the landscape, social tensions, and characters of those living there.

Bringing a contemporary twist to the tradition of M R James, E F Benson and Elizabeth Jane Howard, these are particularly British stories of characters lost in a landscape that, through its vastness and history, consumes them. A landscape large and old enough to harbour true terror.

Written at the border of the psychological and the supernatural, the rural and the urban; on the lonely stretches of saltmarsh and river and field; at the edge of things — Pale Winter Light shines in the places where there is fear arriving all the time, always trying to get in.