While you suspect some of Miss Stewart’s machinations, the ending is a shocker. The creepy factor builds deliciously, in the best kind of country-house mystery fashion, and you’re not sure exactly what horrors will emerge. Taylor takes his time letting us get to know Tom and better empathize with his frustrations. What a fun read! The Reaping is a slow burn. Tom finishes the portrait and hopes he is done with Woolvercombe House for good…only to find neither he, nor his family have escaped Miss Stewart clutches. Then there are the five mysterious nuns living on the property, who Tom discovers are not exactly models of piety. The ailing Miss Stewart, whose garish makeup fails to hide the sight and smells of her sour old age the sly manservant, Carl the too-efficient secretary, Mrs. Tom’s love of his craft is reenergized and, inexplicably, so his libido…but Tom gets a creepy vibe about the rest of Woolvercombe’s inhabitants. He seizes the chance, and he and the shy Catherine warm to each other (“warm” is an understatement). Life is uninspiring until Tom gets the lucrative opportunity of a lifetime: spend a week at Woolvercombe House painting the beautiful Catherine. His relationship with his globe hopping girlfriend, Ilona, is on the rocks. Dimensions: 8.00in - 5.00in - 0.56in - 0.Tom has all but given up his dreams of being an artist and settled for a steady career as shopkeeper to best support his young children.'Weaves a web that grows tighter with each turn of the page' - Booklist on The Reaping Book Details 'I enjoyed every horrid word of it' - Daily Telegraph on The Godsend In these tales, which often feature an unexpectedly cruel or bizarre twist, Taylor offers a clever mixture of horror and black humour that will delight fans of the genre. Grant as the finest ghost story of all time. The thirteen stories collected here represent the complete short fiction of Bernard Taylor, one of the bestselling horror authors of the 1970s and '80s, author of The Godsend and Mother's Boys, both adapted for film, and Sweetheart, Sweetheart, hailed by Charles L. And in 'Samhain', marital strife threatens to turn deadly when a witch turns to black magic to do away with her pathetic husband. A tourist fascinated by the serial killer John Reginald Christie undergoes an uncanny and horrific experience on a trip to London in 'Forget-Me-Not'. In 'Travelling Light', a traveller is obliged to share a room with a strange man who seems to know a little too much about a series of bizarre murders in which wives have been slain by their husbands. In 'Out of Sorts', things get hairy for a man's wife and his mistress when he begins to feel unwell on the night of a full moon. The complete short fiction of a master of modern horror fiction

The reaping bernard taylor