What’s that, you say? Autumn is upon us, and you’re in the mood for some creepy reading? Then I have some exciting news: Cherub, an all-new collection of six unsettling tales by author Nick Sidhu, is now officially on sale!
Check out the awesome cover to Cherub - with artwork by the author himself!
The book is the second release from Mutant Hoof, the publishing imprint Nick and myself founded for our maiden effort Binocular. Nick has outdone himself with this one: each tale is a tautly claustrophobic gem — or as the dust jacket puts it: “Six unhinged drizzlescapes to murky the mind…”
In ‘X’, a young professional hears her telly calling her name in the dead of night; in ‘Marigold’, a bored insurance underwriter discovers an otherworldly creature in the woods behind his house; whilst in the titular ‘Cherub’, a demure black cat walks through her blood-spattered house as bodies accumulate…
Each of the six tales interweaves unspoken anxieties of contemporary life — fears of inadequacy, guilt and abandonment — with slow-burning intrusions of the uncanny into waking reality. Fans of the “strange stories” of Robert Aickman might experience a familiar, disturbing frisson.
And running throughout each tale, like a malignant stick of Brighton rock, is a deliciously surreal streak of dark humour. In the frankly unhinged ‘Flosk’ — in which a young idler tries to recapture a lost love by stealing a man’s soul — the not-all-there narrator’s version of events recalls the warped monologues of Chris Morris’ Blue Jam.
Call me biased if you will (the multitalented Mr Sidhu has acted in many of my films, including Friend and The Fallen Woman), but I believe Cherub is an unforgettably disquieting collection, and is destined to be a future cult classic.
If — like Nick and myself — you belong to the ‘Haunted Generation’, and have cherished memories of horror’s heyday in the Seventies and Eighties, when bookshop shelves groaned with the early works of Herbert, King and Straub, Cherub is guaranteed to evoke a shudder of fond recognition.
The book will be rolled out on the usual platforms soon, but you can nab it now via Lulu as an eBook or a nifty retro paperback. And if any of you reviewers or influencers want to get the jump on your peers, you can reach Nick here to request a review copy: cellar@mutanthoof.com.
As the troubled protagonist of ‘There There’ (one of the collection’s grimmest tales) says: I was frightened but all the time I wanted to start laughing again…