What is it about the psychogeography of Britain’s South Coast? For some reason, the land and seascapes of Sussex have always been a draw for our ghosts, witches, Satanists and black magicians and it’s hard to say whether it is their presence which is responsible for creating that magnetic energy or maybe something about the land itself, and possibly the tidal patterns flowing around that land, which explains the region’s tremendous occult power. Whatever the cause, many people who have visited there will have experienced at least one or two ‘is there something I can’t see lurking behind my shoulder?’ moments, and when Gareth E. Rees leaves London and moves into a dilapidated Victorian house in Hastings his life quickly becomes a collision of the real and the unreal, drawing him into a miasma that threatens to shatter his sanity.
But The Stone Tide isn’t about the paranormal as much as it is about loss, grief, and how we struggle to make sense of our world through the medium of storytelling. When Rees and his young family arrive in Hastings and he begins to start work on his new novel, it feels as if they are all in a reasonably good place. Yes, money’s a worry and their gothic pile is going to take a lot of care and attention but personally and professionally Gareth and his wife Emily are doing pretty well. Except, from almost the very first moments of living in the house, malign forces conspire to rip them apart. Could the house be haunted or is the house, and Hastings, just a dark conduit for ghosts of Gareth’s past which their new home have awakened? After all, Hastings is the place where his best friend died twenty years earlier. Gareth thought he had come to terms with that, but now the memories are back with a vengeance.
Or could other factors be at play? Could the research Gareth is conducting for his new book actually be slashing open the veil that divides fantasy from reality? As Gareth studies Hastings and its history, he begins to assemble a puzzle which connects the ‘Great Beast’ Aleister Crowley (one of Hasting’s most infamous residents) to John Logie Baird to the notorious archaeological hoax the Piltdown Man, with many other intriguing twists and turns in-between. It is research that leads him down ancient streets and into churchyards, perhaps looking for evidence and symbolism that does not truly exist. Or maybe it does? But Gareth’s health is failing and then there are the flies, the rats and the seemingly possessed seagulls who seem to have selected him for special diabolical attention.
The Stone Tide is an extraordinary book. It feels wrong to call it a novel (even though that’s how the back cover describes it) because Gareth E. Rees is the man who wrote it, not a fictional character trapped within some increasingly hellish horror story. Taken from that point-of-view it’s especially moving and exceptionally troubling because we’re never quite sure what to believe or what may only be a convincing flight of imagination (we can all think of several supernaturally-themed books that allegedly have real life at their core but which turn out to be nothing like it). But, whether it’s truth or fiction or something in-between, The Stone Tide is grown-up folk horror which will give most of us more than a few nasty shivers.
THE STONE TIDE / AUTHOR: GARETH E. REES / PUBLISHER: INFLUX PRESS / RELEASE DATE: OUT NOW
