Shadow Black by Tom Arden Subject: Science Fiction Publisher: Big Engine (UK) Edition Our Price inc. p&p Status first edition trade paperback, 299pp, ISBN 1903468051, 2002 N/A out of stock

Tom Arden's Shadow Black is sinuous, sensual, and strange, with lashings of macabre humour and a feverish eroticism. This is Sunset Boulevard set on the English coast and directed by Fellini. Molly Brown

England, 1955. Harriet Locke accepts an invitation to the seaside mansion of Shadow Black and looks forward to joining her fiancé Mark Vardell, the handsome avant-garde artist who is painting the reclusive Lord Harrowblest. Her life is about to change, and change forever, in a household of bizarre characters bound together by ties of deceit, lust and half-truths.

At Shadow Black, Harriet meets Yardley Urban, faded Hollywood goddess, and Cora Van Voyd, elderly, seven-times-married gossip and grande dame. There is crippled, embittered media mogul Lord Harrowblest and his faithful servant Collidge; pathetic, drunken songwriter Jellicoe Travers; Milly, the hare-lipped parlourmaid; and Toby Chance, the lonely fifteen-year-old science fiction fan who somehow links them all together.

And then there is Mr Vox, mysterious agent of a force that will tear away the veils of deceit from Shadow Black, and from Harriet too, in a climax that boldly mingles fantasy, social comedy and gothic horror.

The author
Tom Arden, who grew up in Australia, has worked as a university lecturer in Northern Ireland and now lives in England. His first novel was Moon Escape, written when he was seven, but it was with The Orokon series that he hit the public eye when it began appearing in 1997: a five-volume fantasy epic set in a Ruritanian world halfway between Jane Austen and Mervyn Peake. Now a full-time writer, he reviews regularly for Interzone and is a columnist for the sf, fantasy and horror website At the World's End.