Copy of Offcumden cover reveal IG story

Extracts

Exclusive extract: Offcumden by Johnny Gaunt

Johnny Gaunt

Superb - a rare and wildly imaginative, epic treat of a debut. A masterpiece of literary folk horror, and a future classic, for sure.’

LUCIE McKNIGHT HARDY, author of Water Shall Refuse Them

Offcumden is a lyrical, haunting, heady coming of age story as well as a stirring defense of the outsider and a condemnation of the continuing madness of misogyny and bigotry. An impressive, inventive, atmospheric, and creepy as hell debut.

PAUL TREMBLAY, New York Times bestselling author of A Head Full of Ghosts

Johnny Gaunt uses the Yorkshire landscape and dialect to perfectly fuse the everyday with the uncanny. Three young protagonists journey into a hidden nightmarish world to save a sister lost to repulsive evil, a journey oozing with skin-prickling dread and twists. By the time the secrets and horrors of the past are revealed, I could barely breathe – a gut-punch of a payoff. OFFCUMDEN is genuinely frightening tale undercut by a moving evocation of outsider friendship. A staggering debut.

FRANCES CRAWFORD, multi-award-winning author of A Bad, Bad Place

An outstanding debut - vivid, unsettling and affecting, with incredible prose and scenes of genuine terror that haunted my dreams. If Stephen King had been born on a council estate in Yorkshire, he might well have written something like Offcumden!

GARETH BROWN, bestselling author of The Book of Doors

Johnny Gaunt writes with an extraordinary feel for verbal texture, rhythm and the look and feel of words on the page. Offcumden is dark, macabre, sensory and strange; gothic and dreamlike, yet utterly its own. It takes risks, refuses easy answers and is full of the kind of gorgeous, unsettling detail that stays with you. Johnny has a genuinely unique voice. Readers need to read him.

RAY ROBINSON, award-winning author of The Mating Habits of Stags

Brutal, raw and strangely beautiful, Offcumden is a dark and dirty folk horror hewn from Millstone Grit, coal, and heart. An astonishing debut.

DAVID BARNETT, acclaimed author of Withered Hill

The new high-water mark of British Horror. The prose is tactile with engrossing detail, drawing us into a world that's rich, desperately vulnerable and deeply threatening. Gaunt mesmerises on every page.

STEPHEN VOLK, writer of the classic series 'Ghostwatch'

A new voice emerges in folk horror, hoarse and thick with the blood, soil, and harsh mining landscapes of Yorkshire. Offcumden is more experience than novel, full of a terrifying pulsating darkness, and told by an unforgettable protagonist. Johnny Gaunt is one to watch . . . nervously.

ALLY WILKES, acclaimed author of All the White Spaces

Off-cum-den (old Yorkshire dialect): off-comer; outsider; one who doesn’t belong. 
 
South Yorkshire, 1984. 
 
From his garden shed, thirteen-year-old Chrissy-boy Foster is watching his world fall apart. His dad’s in prison for a picket-line fight. His mum is on the edge of a nervous breakdown. Sadie — Chrissy-boy’s sister — is kept locked in her room. ‘She’s poorly’ is all he’s ever told. But despite his sheltered upbringing, Chrissy-boy knows there’s much more to her frightening condition. 
 
When his dog runs away, Chrissy-boy teams up with two other school outsiders: Aasha, a Kashmiri girl newly moved onto the council estate; and Mickey, from the old traveller family that runs the local scrapyard. Their search pulls them into Black Carr, the sprawling primal forest that edges the council estates of the Rother valley. Beneath those woods, something is waking — something ancient and evil, something that connects their families and their secrets, their guilt. 
 
As the three friends journey deeper into the heart of the valley, they begin to uncover the horror that their parents and grandparents had tried to bury . . . but that the land itself refuses to forget. 
 
‘An outstanding debut - vivid, unsettling and affecting, with incredible prose and scenes of genuine terror . . . if Stephen King had been born on a council estate in Yorkshire, he might well have written something like Offcumden!' GARETH BROWN, bestselling author of The Book of Doors

Johnny Gaunt

Articles featuring Johnny Gaunt

Exclusive extract: Offcumden by Johnny Gaunt

Follow penguin

Follow ladybird

Follow puffin

Sign up to the Penguin newsletter