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The Feast of All Souls Paperback – December 6, 2016

by Simon Bestwick (Author)

3.8 18 ratings

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Alice has returned to her old home town to put her life back in order.

378 Collarmill Road looks like an ordinary house. But sometimes, the world outside the windows isn’t the one you expect to see; sometimes you’ll turn around and find you’re not alone.

An old flame of Alice’s – John Revell – reluctantly comes to her aid when the house begins to reveal its secrets. The hill on which it sits is a place of legends – of Old Harry, the Beast of Crawbeck; of the Virgin of the Height and the mysterious Red Man – and home to the secrets of the shadowy Arodias Thorne.

Thorne’s influence seeps up through the ground, infiltrating Alice’s new home, and only she and John stand between Arodias and the rest of our world.

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About the Author

Simon Bestwick is the author of Tide of Souls, The Faceless, Hell's Ditch and the serial novel Black Mountain, together with the story collections A Hazy Shade of Winter, Pictures Of The Dark, Let's Drink To The Dead and The Condemned. After having spent most of his life in Manchester, he now lives on the Wirral with a long-suffering girlfriend. When not writing, he goes for walks, watches movies, listens to music and does everything in his power to avoid having to get a proper job.

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Solaris (December 6, 2016)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Paperback ‏ : ‎ 400 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1781084629
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1781084625
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 9.6 ounces
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5 x 1 x 8 inches

Customer Reviews:
3.8 18 ratings

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Simon Bestwick

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Described as ‘Brilliant’ by the Guardian, ‘among the most important writers of contemporary British horror’ by Ramsey Campbell, and ‘completely lacking in common sense’ by his mother, Simon Bestwick was born in Wolverhampton. Thankfully, his family escaped to civilisation (well, Manchester) where he lived for many years before relocating to Merseyside, having finally found a partner who’d put up with him. He now lives on the Wirral, where he dreams of moving to Wales, getting a dog, and not having a proper job. He is the author of seven novels and four full-length short story collections, has been four times shortlisted for the British Fantasy Award, and is addicted to tea, Pepsi Max and semicolons.

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3.8 out of 5

18 global ratings

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Paul Azzopardi

Great Read

Reviewed in the United States on November 13, 2018

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This was a great story that i enjoyed including its use comingling SiFi with horror.

Will follow his work ...

Reviewed in the United States on October 29, 2018

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Good story, but a little on the long and winding side. Took a while to get to the point. Not for the easily disturbed.

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Raindancer 54

Simon Bestwick is a tour de force!

Reviewed in the United States on December 4, 2019

What an excellent story. One of those you cannot tear yourself away from and resent every minute you have to go about your normal daily life. Everything about this worked. Alice - the main character - devastated by the loss of her eight year old daughter, buys a large house. It will be a fixer-upper - a project she can get her teeth into - but it isn't long before she finds out hers is not your everyday normal house. Voices, manifestations... and the children. Oh my heavens, those children! Local legends and folklore abound, including the origin of the unusual name of the location - Collarmill Road in Crowbeck. Alice is swept up in events that have existed for centuries, millennia even.

Alongside this, we have the account of Mary Carson, who lived in the nineteenth century and is making a detailed confession of her earlier life. Arodias Thorne features prominently - an exploitative and cruel mill owner whose evil extends far beyond the world and time he occupied.

Alice needs help, and finds it in the shape of a former lover, John Revell. The mysterious Red Man seems to hold some of the answers as to what is going on, but the house itself guards its secrets well.

I really cannot recommend this book highly enough. If you love horror - really well crafted horror - you're going to love this.

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Thomas O'Grady

... on his opinions to make this book a very good read. Maybe when he stops doing that and ...

Reviewed in the United States on January 22, 2017

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This book was to busy checking off all the items on it's list of things to show us that the writer was up to date on his opinions to make this book a very good read. Maybe when he stops doing that and finds his voice I will give him another try.

2 people found this helpful

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krieger

Two Stars

Reviewed in the United States on April 28, 2017

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Was difficult keeping my attention,

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Pop Bop

Loaded With Everything You Could Want

Reviewed in the United States on December 7, 2016

I'm done with "Turn of the Screw" horror/gothic/supernatural. Oh, was that a ghostly reflection in the mirror? My dear, did that tea cup move by itself? Pah! I want action, horror, and lots of quirky characters monologuing away about the creepy history of some forsaken plot. Well, you'll get that here in spades.

A plot summary doesn't do this justice. Short version - Alice moves to a creepy house and bad things happen, which leads her to discover even worse things happened before and might happen again. That describes just about every evil portal book ever written.

Ahh, but here we just keep piling on. We start slowly. Alice is mopey and depressed and moves into a worn out isolated house to escape her failed marriage and the memory of her dead daughter. (MEDIUM PREMISE SPOILER: Warning - lots of child ghosts in this book, so if that is a no-no be warned.) During the first twenty or so pages Alice is so mopey and behaves so much like a walking exposed nerve ending I almost gave up. But then, we switch into high gear.

MORE MILD VERY GENERAL SPOILERS: Then ghosts show up. Not ghost hints and shuffles and whispers and cold drafts. Ghosts. Then beasts, dreams, apparitions, things, screams, whispers, dread and danger. Alice starts to pull herself together and develops a spine. She reconnects with an old boyfriend, so she isn't just talking to herself. Then we start to research the house history. This is where it gets good if you like exposition and monologuing. We talk to priests and locals. We learn about local folktales, Christian adoption of pagan customs, Arthur stuff, village mysteries. We find documents that explain things. We find transcribed confessions that fill in historical blanks. Heck, over a few beers we talk about space time and alternate universes. I mean, we seriously pull out the stops.

And it's all interesting. That's mostly because Alice finally becomes interesting, and because all of the locals who know things and spill the beans to Alice do it in story-telling form, and each local has a distinctive voice and attitude. (The priest who knows the most is drop-dead funny in a sarcastic, sardonic way that is much better written than is usual for a gothic horror novel.)

So, the upshot is that we have evil, mega-evil, supernatural evil, normal human evil, mystery, forgotten realms, ghosts, running and hiding, fighting back, beasts, protectors, sad bits, funny bits, trapdoors, tunnels, and multiple levels of insanity and degradation. Wow. It really was a feast.

(Please note that I received a free advance ecopy of this book without a review requirement, or any influence regarding review content should I choose to post a review. Apart from that I have no connection at all to either the author or the publisher of this book.)

3 people found this helpful

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S. Mahaffey

An excellent novel!

Reviewed in the United States on September 7, 2017

There are 2 narratives in Manchester, England. Alice Collier has moved to her new home that is a fixer-upper. It's a large home but she needs the space when she wants to roam at night. She is trying to rebuild her life after losing her daughter and the divorce. Alice's story is paired with Mary Carson who tells about her past in the spring of 1837. She is hired as a secretary to work for the wealthy mill owner named Arodias Thorne. She is naive and over her head with Mr. Thorne. Alice is taking medication for depression and thinks she is imagining the children she hears. The children attempt to kill her. They throw knives at her which causes her to call an old boyfriend who did paranormal research. He is reluctant to help at first but decides to after seeing the wounds on Alice's back. Meanwhile Mary is tying to figure out where she stands with Mr. Thorne. Mary sees the ghosts too but decides that they are hallucinations.

I don't want to spoil the story for you by telling anymore. This is more than a ghost story. It is also a confounding mystery. I loved this story. It kept my attention throughout the book. I was never bored!

Disclaimer: I received an arc of this book free from the author/publisher from Netgalley. I was not obliged to write a favorable review, or even any review at all. The opinions expressed are strictly my own.

Reviewed in the United States on December 4, 2016

A really well written immersive read. I was right into it and couldn't put it down. Sad to see it finish. First time reading anything by his author. Will be looking out for more of his work. I received a copy from NetGalley

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Mina

A gothic mystery horror with too much soul searching for my tastes. 3,5 stars.

Reviewed in Germany on June 11, 2017

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"A Feast of all Souls" is as much the story of a place as it is one of people: a house in a small town north of Manchaster is the focal point of two women's hard (even horrifying) experiences. There is Alice, living in 2016 and moving into said house to come to grips with her daughter's death and subsequent dissolving of her marriage. But the house turns out to present its own set of problems: as the book's synopsis says, it is a kind of gateway to another time and because of things that happened there long ago and seemingly from the beginnings of time, there are hostile ghosts and other monsters. To get behind the mystery and hopefully find some kind of remedy, Alice needs to find out about the past and and she enlists the hesitant help of one ex-fiancé, whom she once left because he spent his time hunting ghosts (yeah it's either irony or too much of a convenient coincidence...).

Parallel to Alice's nowadays search, a woman named Mary Carson tells her story, or more precisely, confesses her sins in said house 200 years prior. Her story is dreadful, even worse than Alice's, but even when it was at times hard to read, it provided a very good insight. When the whole picture finally is revealed, I was pleasantly surprised, since it was well founded, logical and at the same time magical and mind-boggling. So, great mystery: check. Adequate horror: check. Cool explanation: check. And unexpected turns: check.

But, not all convinced me. As much as I liked Mary Carson's 19th century story, as much was I overwhelmed by Alice's very detailed backstory that was inserted at the most inconvenient of times. Meaning every time I wanted to see what happened either in Alice's present time or in Mary's life, I instead got some episode of Alice's past. And believe me, aside from her tragic loss of her daughter, this past isn't too interesting. And then there is the ex, who is still no price in my opinion, but well, to everyone his heaven. This book felt a bit, as if it couldn't decide what it wanted to be: a gothic mystery novel with classic horror elements and a stunning revelation of events that get worse and worse, or the story of a woman trying to claw her way back out of a serious depression, with all the obligatory ups and downs and stuff. Problem for me was that I don't read books about people fighting depression, I'm a fantasy reader who throws in gothic mysteries from time to time. So that was all too much for me and made me ultimately give 3,5 stars.

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bermard nugent

He's done it again!!! Another brilliant novel from the Bestwick stable!!!

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on December 31, 2016

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Simon Bestwick has done it again!!!!! A brilliant gothic novel an interesting and compelling read that you can't put down!
Simon Bestwick's novels are going from strength to strength. If you like horror then you'll love this!!!

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