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Written by David Gatward.

Published on 1st July 2010 by Hodder Children’s Books - £5.99

When I was a young un in the late 70s / early 80s (a frighteningly long time ago now) every local supermarket had a revolving display of paperback novels, alongside the big hitters like Stephen King, James Herbert, and bestselling one-offs like The Amtyville Horror and The Exorcist, the shelves fair bulged with thin horror novels with lurid titles and more lurid covers usually published by Pan or New English Library. Alas the popularity of horror fiction was a bubble, which inevitably burst dramatically. Now you need to find a particularly huge Waterstones or a dedicated specialist fantasy and sci-fi bookseller to locate a dedicated horror section, and even then it will mostly be stocked with Stephen King, Dean Koontz and precious little else. Writers still plying their trade in the genre have had to play a canny game of “hide the genre”. Disguising horror in the crime genre is a popular tactic, following the template of William Hjortsberg's Falling Angel (filmed as Angel Heart), John Connelly's fantastic Charlie Parker series is the current cream of this crop. Other writers, like Michael Marshall, have moved to the post-Thomas Harris psycho-thriller genre. The other alternative is small press publications, but it’s hard enough carving out a living with a major publishing house these days.

Amid all this gloom for horror fiction there are some rays of light, hardcore horror has found a natural home in comics (I dare you to find anything quite as grim as Garth Ennis’ sort-of zombie series Crossed), and for more mainstream, for less graphic fare fantasy and horror has found a fertile market in young adult fiction, not only with Twilight (for better or worse, but I’m not getting pulled into debating the merits of Stephanie Meyer, for that way lies madness and eternal flaming tweets) but also with the likes of Darren Shan and The Fast Show creator and Young Bond author Charlie Higson’s recent teen-zombie thriller The Enemy.

David Gatward’s The Dead is clearly aiming at the Darren Shan end of the market, rather than the Stephanie Meyer end, in other words this is one for the boys. The Dead sticks firmly to the strain of children’s fiction that centres on an outsider adolescent, either an orphan or with absent parents, who discovers that they are in fact special or chosen. This is potent stuff for any teenager, especially teenage boys. And Gatward knows not to mess with a proven formula. Thus we find the novel's hero Lazarus Stone, on the cusp of his sixteenth birthday. Lazarus' mother died years earlier in a car accident leaving the boy to be raised by a distant father. Lazarus’s rather dreary life is blown apart one night by a visit from a mysterious stranger Red who appears to have had the skin flayed from his body. Red reveals that Lazarus is in mortal peril. The unruly dead are able to push through from their realm into ours and Lazarus’ father is not a corporate security consultant, but in fact a “keeper” charged with making sure the worlds of the living and the dead are kept far apart. But something has gone badly wrong, Lazarus’s father has disappeared while on a business trip and the dead are breaking through into our world. Our reluctant hero finds that the lineage of the Keepers is passed from father to son. This is not something Lazarus either believes or accepts, so he enlists his horror geek best mate Craig and Clair an amateur ghost hunter to investigate.

The Dead will be familiar stuff to more grown up horror fans (old farts I believe the kids call us) playing with celestial themes familiar from films like The Prophecy and the recent Legion, as well as in comic series like Sandman and especially Hellblazer. In fact The Dead could be seen as Hellblazer Jr, Lazarus has a long way to go before he equals the depth and complexity of antihero John Constantine, but his surly attitude is cut from similar cloth.

The novel takes quite a while to get going (surprising for such a short book), spending rather too long setting things up in the opening half, but when it does gathers a pleasing head of steam and is likely to keep it’s target audience amused. It ends with a jolt and is clearly just part 1 of a larger story, but if Gatward can get the next episode out quickly and can control his impulse to employ cheesy dialogue he may have a hit with his target audience.

Advice for anyone thinking of buying this for a “young adult”, while it could serve as a good early dip into the murky world of the horror genre, it is definitely aimed at young adults and not children. While the writing is direct and unpretentious, the imagery and violence could be disturbing for under 14s.

Stuart Barr.

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