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Synopsis

It was a short note. Signed simply ‘Sam’. But it was enough to send ex-FBI agent Alex Rourke on a search to an isolated valley in the American mid-West.

And now he’s trapped there – in the middle of the night, in the middle of nowhere, in the middle of a ferocious storm. With him are a dozen other men and women, all seeking shelter in Isaac’s Bar.

However the night is about to turn deadly - when the nearby riverbank collapses, and spits out two badly decomposed bodies. The man and the woman were clearly murdered and buried there months before…

As secrets, recriminations and violent agendas come to the fore in the bar that’s now cut off from the world, Alex races to find ‘the crosses’. And then the deaths begin, one by one by one...

Download and read the opening chapters of Burial Ground here

Reviews

Interview

John Rickards on the perils of writing crime fiction...

They Can’t Get Us All… Can They?

I love survival horror. Good survival horror, you understand. Alien, for instance. John Carpenter’s version of The Thing – classic stuff. The first Silent Hill game, for those of you who know your Playstation. Claustrophobic, paranoid and desperate. A band of people who, over the course of a given story, are slowly whittled away one by one until only a couple make it out alive. Great fun.

It’s not, sadly, something that translates very well into the written form. Jack Ketchum wrote what is possibly the best-known example with Off Season back in the early 80s. The novella that the various The Thing films were based on, Who Goes There?, was written in the 1930s and is well worth a read if you can find an electronic copy that the sellers haven’t made impossible to read, even by legitimate buyers, by cramming with digital rights protection.

There’s plenty of terrible survival horror out there, of course. (It says something when the various Resident Evil tie-in books are some of the best of the available genre.)

Why am I talking about horror? Surely, I hear you thinking furiously, this is a crime fiction website? I don’t care about spooks and werewolves and terribly unbelievable gore-laden scenarios, thankyouverymuch. I’ll have a nice realistic story where the killer is finally tracked down by the maverick cop who realises the toenail clippings left at each crime scene spell out a message in Ancient Mayan telling him it’s his own father behind the slayings. None of this horror talk, boy!

Of course, crime trampled roughshod over what used to be considered the horror genre’s turf years ago and hasn’t shown any sign of letting go since. Half our output is focused largely on constructing terrifying (or “chilling”, to borrow from a hundred jacket blurbs) monsters who must be stopped before they can slaughter everyone within a five-mile radius, and who, but for a couple of quick edits, could just as easily be reanimated murderers slaughtering American teens at a lakeside campground.

Survival horror’s tropes have remained mostly untouched in this great co-opting of another genre’s stamping grounds, by crime, at least. Thrillers have used much the same set-up for years – disaster movies and books are almost uniformly tales in which most of the cast will die in the earthquake, drown in the sinking liner, fall into the volcano or succumb to the disease (or the ever popular “lose it completely and kill either themselves or others as the pressure gets too much”). That the ‘enemy’ is not human (or monster) but elemental forces and the whims of fate is the only difference between the disaster story and survival horror.

That and a lot of shouting things like “They’re coming out of the goddamn walls!” while filling the air with lead, of course.

But why not give it a crack? True, Burial Ground isn’t survival horror. Even its bloodier earlier draft, it was always a thriller, but it’s in watching movies like The Thing that the initial seed was germinated.

You see, I also like a challenge, and in mystery writing in particular (whether horrific or terribly polite), there’s nothing to cut down on the dodges available to a writer quite like a sealed environment.

No, I don’t mean one of those ‘locked room’ mysteries, where it turns out the elderly colonel was delicately poisoned in his own chambers by a specially trained squirrel, owned by the jealous vicar, which entered and exited via the chimney, carefully replacing the fireguard before it left. I mean a sealed environment – a story set within a restricted area, one from which there’s no escape, and one to which fresh characters can’t be added unless they’re already present.

The kind of thing, in fact, which is very common in survival horror (or ‘siege’ type thrillers such as Assault on Precinct Thirteen, come to that). There’s no way of leaving the Antarctic base in The Thing. Ripley can’t just jump off the ship and into the nearest hotel in Alien. And no one can call the cops or fetch the cavalry (indeed, to do so would rather spoil the fun).

Raymond Chandler famously suggested that stuck writers have someone walk through the door with a gun; working out who that person is and what they’re up to can come later. You can’t do that if your environment is sealed. Unless that person was inside when the doors shut, they can’t just pop up unexpectedly.

Similarly, writers are no stranger to shaking up the action by switching to a different locale or a new character. The urban cop leaves his comfortable surroundings to meet a contact in the container-stacked wasteland of the docks and – ohmygod – it’s a trap and there’s a shootout. Or to detract from the growing monotony of the police investigation into the puppy-eating serial killer (“We’ve identified the breed. It’s a border collie, which means this is escalating. He WILL kill AGAIN!”) we take our main character off to interview the latest victim’s family and contrast the cops’ regular surroundings with the personal circumstances of the recently bereaved. It fills up a few pages, doesn’t it?

I’d never stoop to such obvious tricks, you understand. I am merely describing them in my role as public educator.

You can’t do either of those when you introduce most of the people and most of the surroundings in your first five pages and leave everyone stuck there.

Because merely attempting the difficult isn’t enough for me – I like to think of myself as a Challenger of the Impossible – a sealed environment wasn’t the only limit I fancied trying. I wanted to fit the whole thing, start to end, into the span of a single night. Twelve hours or less, and even less scope for padding everything out with descriptions of sunrises. It’s another common feature of survival horror, and again, a less common feature of mystery writing.

Not to say it doesn’t happen either, of course. Key Largo used it, as did Dog Day Afternoon. I believe the jacket copy on Burial Ground mentions Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None, which I assume is a good comparison; I’d rather scoop my eyeballs out with a spoon than read another one of Christie’s books, so I can’t say for sure.

It again limits the number of dodges you can pull as a writer to move things along, and obviously places enormous restraints on what you can and can’t include in the story. No DNA testing or slow escalation of criminal nastiness here; you’ve got your allotted time and you can’t play silly buggers with it.

Survival horror done right is a marvellous little subgenre. The aim is to survive – not to solve the mystery, not to see good conquer evil, but merely to make it out in one piece against all the odds. While the mystery of The Thing is solved towards the end, it doesn’t help anyone stay alive and, ultimately, it doesn’t matter. Alien schmalien. And while one can’t quite go the whole hog down that route – you, the reader, and consequently the good folks bearing the mark of the flightless seabird, won’t easily allow it in the crime genre, where resolution and overall meaning have to come in some form or another at the end point of the story – it’s perfectly possible to borrow enough of it to have a lot of fun.

That was the aim, and I think it just about works. And I only cheated a little bit to achieve it.

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