Hi everyone. Today I am featuring Kev Harrison's latest book "Pyres." Dive into this Dark Supernatural Horror this holiday season and purchase your copy today. Happy reading everyone. :)
There’s a bite in the air that I haven’t felt since … well, since the last time I was here. I pull the jacket round me and do the zip up halfway.
After unlatching the gate, I walk it back, fastening it in place with its rope to a hook on the old stone wall, then dash back to my car and park up.
The house seems at first to be in darkness, but then I catch the orange quiver of candlelight through the windows.
Angela must be painting. Just my luck.
I grab a holdall from the boot—the rest of my things can wait until the morning—and make for the front door. I knock. Wait. And, as expected, there’s no reply.
A glance up at the sky tells me this pause in the rain won’t last long, so I head around the back of the cottage, through the knee-high grass and wildflowers to the old wooden summer house. I lift the locking bar and let myself in.
Cobwebs stretch from corners, telling tales of a summer to forget. I swat them away, careful not to catch any spiders in the process, then make for the curtain at the back. Sweeping it aside, I find the painting—my sister’s first ‘with help’, as she likes to put it—and take it down. The front door key is, as always, nestled in the corner of the frame.
With the summer house locked up, I traipse back to the front door and carefully unlock it. I creep inside, leaving my bag under the coat rack, then lock the door with as much stealth as I can manage.
Now, all that’s left is to follow the wavering shadows from the candlelight, and the pungent fragrance of henbane, to Angela’s studio on the other side of the cottage. I think about using the torch on my phone, but fear the consequences if I wake her while she paints.
The walls are emblazoned with canvases from the hall through to the lounge. The styles are eclectic, so varied you could never say they prescribed to any specific theme. Such is the way of things in her line of artistic expression.
When I reach the glass panelled door to the studio, I pause before turning the handle, knowing as I do that what I’m about to witness will never not jar with me. I take a breath, hold it, and push.
The door glides silently open and she’s there, facing me, hands frantically swiping with the brush on the portrait canvas before her. She balances with poise on the high artist’s stool, despite the extravagant motions of her painting, despite the fact her eyes are rolled back, the bulging sclera pulsing, criss-crossed with angry-looking pink veins. The shadows, swaying in the candlelight, render the scene still more other worldly. Unsettling.
The decades-old futon in the corner looks so inviting, especially as I have no idea how long this could continue for. But curiosity tugs at me, even through the fog of my exhaustion. I always want to know what she’s painting, even if I’m not wholly convinced by the way she describes her methods.
Taking care not to get too close, I tiptoe around the edge of the studio and come to a stop behind her. Her brush hand continues to thrash one way and the other, while mine are drawn, without my permission, to my mouth.
On the canvas, there is a room. The utterly unremarkable magnolia walls and fireplace are not what has stolen my breath. That prize goes to what’s at the centre of the piece. A green, leather armchair, somehow, remains intact, as do one and a half of the legs ‘sitting’ on it, if you can call it that.
At the top of the worst affected of the two legs, the thigh is a bubbled, overcooked mound of flesh, from which a charred femur extends. The torso is missing, but for a blackened imprint melted into the fabric of the chair behind. Despite this, the right leg remains covered in a fragment of a pressed, grey trouser leg. Each foot remains encased in a perfectly preserved shoe.
I try to breathe. Try to remember the mechanism by which my lungs have been pulling in air for the length of my life to date. The extremities of my vision begin to darken, my balance slipping away, when I hear Angela’s voice.
“Not again.”
BLURB:
"Horror’s Kev Harrison is on fire with his latest novel, Pyres, a blistering murder mystery with echoes of Dorian Grey that compels with its artistry as much as its political commentary. Set in the New Forest and conjuring ancient gods, Pyres is darkly revelatory. Definitely make this your next read."
—Lee Murray, five-time Bram Stoker Award®-winning author of Grotesque: Monster Stories
Angela has been a spirit painter for years. Channelling the spirits as they commit memories to canvas through her: childhood pets, favourite holiday locations, and sprawling homesteads. But now, something has changed.
The paintings take a dark turn just as her sister, Becky, returns from Italy. People burnt alive, their smouldering remains a vivid, visceral stain on Angela’s canvasses. Already disturbed, her life is thrown into turmoil when a right wing TV news presenter is found incinerated in a facsimile of her new painting.
As the artworks - and charred bodies - mount up, can Angela and Becky find out what’s happening, and how to stop it?
From the Independent Press Award-winning author of Shadow of the Hidden, Pyres is a tense, taut novel of supernatural horror.
Purchase your Copy Today!
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Originally from the UK, but now living in Lisbon, Portugal, Kev Harrison is the Independent Press Award-winning author of Shadow of the Hidden and his newest novel, Pyres, as well as the novellas, Below and The Balance. His short fiction has appeared in more than twenty venues and is collected in Paths Best Left Untrodden. When not crafting creepy tales, he can be found travelling and eating with his partner in crime, Ana, or singing bizarre songs to his three cat overlords.
Follow Kev at the Following Links:
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Enter to Win:
A Paperback of the Book and of my Previous Novel, Shadow of the Hidden,
$10 Amazon or PayPal Gift Card
— 1 Winner Each!
Follow the tour HERE for special content and a giveaway!
Next Stop on the Tour:
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