Lost In The Garden by Adam S Leslie

I would like to thank Dead Ink Books for an advance copy of this novel in exchange for a fair and honest review

Publisher – Dead Ink

Published – Out Now

Price – £10.99 paperback £4.99 Kindle eBook

Like an old wives’ tale, like a piece of wisdom passed down through generations which no one questioned of even thought about too hard. Like folklore. It was just something everyone knew, a rule to be followed.

Don’t go to Almanby.

Heather, Rachel and Antonia are going to Almanby.

Heather needs to find her boyfriend who, like so many, went and never came back.

Rachel has a mysterious package to deliver, and her life depends on it.

And Antonia - poor, lovestruck Antonia just wants the chance to spend the day with Heather.

So off they set through the idyllic yet perilous English countryside, in which nature thrives in abundance and summer lasts forever, and as they travel through ever-shifting geography and encounter strange voices in the fizz of shortwave radio, the harder it becomes to tell friend from foe.

Creepy, dreamlike, unsettling and unforgettable - you are about to join the privileged few who come to understand exactly why we don't go to Almanby.

The horror story is often associated with the colder time of year. When nights are long, very dark and cold and we retreat to our homes. The end of the year is something we have associated since Halloween with the scarier side of storytelling. But summer too can be powerfully creepy and in Adam S Leslie’s amazingly malevolent and eerie novel Lost In The Garden we get a tale that makes the feel of summer like a gathering thunderstorm bringing doom for its unique characters.

The world has now been in an endless hot summer for many years. People die and come back as ghosts who wander the world aimlessly until people get too close to them and are attacked. The world is now quieter, fractured and cut-off from each other. In a small countryside village the effervescent risk taking Heather is missing her beloved boyfriend who should have returned months ago. She decides to accompany her crafty friend Rachel on a delivery drop while they press gang not quite a stand-up comedian Antonia to drive them to the same destination. The place everyone wants you never to go to; never to stay as you may never come back the village of Almanby.

This is one of the most powerful horror novels I’ve read this year. It feels initially a bit dreamy but soon becomes a winding, oppressive and genuinely scary. This from the start feels a world that is off with endless summer and violent ghosts and yet they’re not the creepiest things in the story. They underline though from the start reality as we know it has ended. With eh trio of characters the suspicion is that the world as it now is has affected the way people think and act in the same ways that long hot heat waves affect our concentration; our tempers and our ability to think.

Initially these three characters can all be quite annoying – Heather is super cheerful; appears to have the attention of a gnat(young child) and acts on impulse by the second. She drags people into danger and seems often oblivious and yet in such a world perhaps these daily dangers affect how you think. Her love for her boyfriend is genuine and every now and then we et a glimpse of a less manic woman feeling she can’t show vulnerability. In contrast Antonia is a very complex mix of terrible puns (told throughout) and a repressive crush on heather. She can feel someone who is pulled along into the wake of her friends but Leslie has also shown someone in this very cut-off world feeling extreme loneliness. The more enigmatic is the regularly ducking and diving Rachel – the friend who genuinely cares for the two but also has fingers in many pies and has her own tass to perform. She may also just possibly have magic powers. It’s a fascinating trio that can annoy you with their poor decisions but as the story progresses it is less clear they are in full control of their decisions and perhaps are more the unlucky three to enter the latest stage of the power of Almanby. They don’t deserve what is happening to them and that makes thing even more worrying as we watch the story escalate

What works so powerfully is what Leslie has created through their dark poetical writing is a growing menace in the story. Folk horror often relies on the old myths and folklore to haunt us and there are some elements in this story but it’s not the key way that Leslie made me feel increasingly uncomfortable. Instead, the modern world and feel of summer is where the scares come from. The cut-off snatches of radio that we hear where someone is talking soundly but it feels constant nonsense, an ice cream van’s tune turns into something truly menacing when we hear it play again and again and again; empty villages, abandoned cafes and forests filled with the very recently dead make everything constantly feel off which increases our wariness as to what can happen next. This is book where reality itself is played with just for the evil fun of it. A character can fall into a timeslip; a building with endless rooms and mysterious weather events that can really hurt you if you’re left out in the open. The randomness of things feels like you’re straying into a very different reality. At the heart of which though is the mystery of Almanby which brings the rising feeling that all these seemingly random events are more like a cat playing with the mice. There is a magnificent malevolence in the story that grows and grows as we finally start to just about unpeel what may be going on but Leslie never explains everything we will all come away with different interpretations of what happened to the characters at the end. This book perfectly captures the feeling of a nightmare where things get creepier just by feeling and it’s own twisted dreamlogic and you suddenly realise you can’t just wake up and leave it instead you have to see it through to the end.

Lost in the Garden is the perfect horror tale for a summers day as you look up and realise the shadows are lengthening, the insects are crawling and stormclouds gather on the horizon. Genuinely creepy, bewitching and very strongly recommended. Adam S Leslie is an author to watch.