Kate Murray

Shadows Close Kate Murray

In October 1983, something happened in Shadows Close. The dead-end road was subject to a week of horror that left the inhabitants shaking with terror. This book documents that week and what happened to each resident. Unlike other short story collections, the characters appear throughout the book as each household lives through its own terror. Shadows Close has ghosts, killers and heroes; be warned that it is advisable not to read it after sunset. A young boy decides to protect his mother at all cost; a house slips into the floodplain; a couple find themselves reliving a story that is a hundred years old; a ghost, who killed its own mother, is threatened; a man tries to save his family from the evil which is steadily crawling toward his house. Written in the lean style of dirty realism the short stories are awash with fear and horror. Set within the confines of one street the stories have a strong narrative framework that allows the location to become as much a character as any of the people in the stories. The threshold has been crossed and Shadows Close is the boundary where the human character is placed under a darkly tinted glass.