Product Description

Edward Atherton, Rector of Thornham St Stephen, should never have meddled with the tomb of the 14th century Abbot of Thornham. From the moment the workman raised the tomb lid, the horror began. Atherton is pursued by a malign shadowy presence to his untimely death a few weeks later.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1528156 in Books
• Published on: 2001-09
• Format: Large Print
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 263 pages

From Kirkus Reviews
Matthew Atherton, son of the late Bishop of Ely and a 19th-century academic of prodigious knowledge and reputation, has a problem for antiquarian Richard Asquith, a Cambridge professor: Can Richard can help his brother Edward, rector of the church at nearby Thornham St Stephen, who has been plagued by strange noises and frightening visions ever since he began to restore the church's ancient tomb of William de Lindesey? Richard is sympathetic but not much help. He's more concerned with the living than the dead--especially when the living come to include Simone, widowed daughter of his old friend René and mother to young Bertrand, whom he courts and marries. Returning to England with his new family, Richard finds both Edward Atherton and his mother dead and buried at Thornham St Stephen, leaving those around them haunted by dark shadows. And now Richard's own house is full of frightening sounds and visions. The plague is everywhere, and Matthew Atherton has disappeared. When Simone and Bertrand fall deathly ill, Richard resolves to seek out the source of evil in the de Lindesey tomb and, at great risk succeeds.Aycliffe (a.k.a. Daniel Easterman) knows how to persuade his readers to suspend common sense and enjoy another of his gracefully written fantasies (The Lost, 1996, etc.). -- Copyright © 2000 Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

About the Author

Customer Reviews

Evil Abbot Haunts the Fens
I'm reading my third Jonathan Aycliffe (who also writes as Daniel Easterman) and will be looking for more of his work. In "A Shadow on the Wall", mysterious scripture appears on a tombstone ('He shall return out of the dark'). An Anglican priest attempts to renovate a church deep in the East Anglican fens. A late-Victorian, Cambridge don is drawn into the mystery of the priest's death. This is M.R. James country, with its spectres seen through a shroud, darkly, and its hero, an unworldly scholar. If you prefer a shock-a-minute, buckets o'blood approach to horror, Aycliffe is probably not for you. If your imagination is your own worst enemy and all you require is a misplaced shadow or a scratching in the attic to keep you awake through the dark hours, read "A Shadow on the Wall" or Aycliffe's "The Talisman". This is the English, Jamesian school of horror at its best.

Elegant homage to M R James
Aycliffe's first venture into the supernatural since 1996's "The Lost" is shorter and simpler than his earlier titles but no less enjoyable. The East Anglian setting, turn-of-the-century university background and scholarly hero make it clear that he is paying tribute to M R James and that great storyteller conjured up few more terrifying images than the dessicated abbot in this novel, unknowingly released from his tomb in a remote Fenland church.

The setting, amidst the bleak, wintry Fens, is what you may remember most about this book, that and the frissons of fear as the shadow of the spectral abbot creeps closer and closer to the hero's loved ones. In Aycliffe's paranoid world, even the church can seem powerless against evil and the eventual resolution is a decidedly ambiguous one.

Recommended.

I Am Not Dead but Living
When Matthew Atherton, another fellow at the University, calls on Richard Asquith for help in unraveling a series of strange events at the church of Thornham St. Stephen, Richard himself plunged into a dark mystery of ancient evil. Matthew's brother Edward, while restoring the church, has opened the 14th Century tomb of William de Lindesey and has released a shadowy evil that haunts the village and is sucking the life from Edward.

The men arrive at Thornham to discover the church locked and Edward horrifyingly dead. Further events only darken the mystery, and Richard finds himself in pursuit of a shadowy affliction that haunts and destroys all the lives it touches. First attacking the villagers and the Atherton's, the evil at last turn's its eyes to those who Asquith loves and his investigation turns into a race with death and what lays beyond it. To accomplish this Asquith must unravel a horror inextricably tied up with events that occurred five hundred years earlier during the black plague.

Aycliffe, on the strength of this and several earlier novels (he also writes as Daniel Easterman) is often compared to Montague James, one of England's finest writers of ghost stories. James is one of a school of early 20th Century horror writers that included Algernon Blackwood, Lord Dunsany and Arthur Machen. The similarity is undeniable, especially in the choice and use of plot devices. However, his choice of writing style, which is that of a novel of the 1890's, is more like that of Machen, who is my particular favorite of the group.

Arthur Machen was brilliant at descriptive narrative, setting eerie atmospheres with swift brushstrokes. Aycliffe, like Machen uses language carefully and has a fine sense of when it is more horrifying to leave something unsaid. Of course, all of Machen and James school were fine writers, and it is a deep compliment to Aycliffe's writing that he can be tarred with the same brush. With the exception of one perfectly horrible pun (an innkeeper reports that Edward dies of an 'apostolic' fit) he stays perfectly in character. I am looking forward to future novels in this vein.