Pretty Little Dead Things / Gary McMahon
“Gary McMahon’s vision is as bleak as a Yorkshire moor, but it glows with a wintry light that illuminates the dark we live in. His prose and his sense of place are precise and evocative, and his characters are as real as you and me. He’s one of the darkest – which is to say brightest – new stars in the firmament of horror fiction.”
- Ramsey Campbell
” ‘Pretty Little Dead Things’ is a very disturbing read. Gary McMahon seems intent on taking readers through the looking glass and tearing down the walls between the living and the dead. He creates dark, hallucinatory images that burn in your brain forever. One very creepy dude, and this is his creepiest to date.”
- Christopher Fowler
“Thomas Usher is a great character treading a twilight world between Manhunter and Most Haunted; conflicted by grief, haunted by blame, a ‘magnet for ghosts’ who sees the skull beneath the skin. In Pretty Little Dead Things, Gary McMahon nails genuine horror as few British writers can – or dare. He gets under your skin, then burrows even deeper. Terrifyingly, dangerously, hauntingly so.”
- Stephen Volk, creator of TV’s Afterlife
“Gary McMahon’s horror is heartfelt, his characters flawed and desperate, and this book is a rich feast of loss, guilt, and redemption. His vivid ideas are given life in beautiful prose, and the book leaves you staring into shadows that weren’t there before. His talent shines, and is set to burn brighter still.”
- Tim Lebbon
Reluctant working class psychic Thomas Usher is drawn into a web of crime, murder and the supernatural when the ghosts of three murdered strippers appear to him asking for help. As a complex mystery unfolds, involving a missing child, a Russian criminal and a violent youth gang on a notorious Leeds sink estate, Usher is driven by the ghosts of his own past to confront an evil that has been stalking him for years…an evil that knows him better than he knows himself.
File Under: Horror [Dead Girls | Family Tragedy | Another World | Urban Terror]
.
Who Is Thomas Usher?
His name is Thomas Usher. A normal man. An average guy. Until he is involved in a tragic accident and his wife and daughter are killed.
After that, things begin to change. Usher is no longer normal. Or average. Now he can see the dead, and the dead can see him. They seek him out to help them, to usher them to the next level so they might face whatever comes next. The lost. The lonely. The departed. They never speak to him; they only ever demand his attention.
The ghosts are drawn to Usher, and he is compelled to help them in the hope that he might once again see his family. But sometimes, just sometimes, it isn’t enough and his efforts make things worse.
His name is Thomas Usher.
He is an usher for the dead.
It’s who he is.
It’s what he does.
.
PRETTY LITTLE DEAD THINGS
Gary McMahon
Horror
Cover: tbc
UK/Australia
5 August 2010
416pp A-format paperback
£7.99 UK
ISBN 978 0 00 736458 9
US/Canada
November 2010
416pp mass-market paperback
$7.99 US $10.99 CAN
ISBN 978 0 06 202145 8
eBook
5 August 2010
price £3
ePub ISBN tbc
