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Offcumden
  • Published: 1 April 2027
  • ISBN: 9781529990027
  • Imprint: Transworld Digital
  • Format: Audio Download
  • RRP: $34.99

Offcumden

Formats & editions
Tr. Paperback
6 Apr 2027
EBook
1 Apr 2027
Audiobook
1 Apr 2027
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Part coming-of-age, part folk-horror story, Offcumden is a haunting novel about outsiders, identity and place - and how evil can seep through soil and blood alike. It's an extraordinary debut that takes its readers on an epic, visceral journey into the dark, secret history of a seemingly abandoned community and its people, a novel that is every bit as disturbing and devastating as Iain Banks' The Wasp Factory all those years ago.

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 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.
  • Published: 1 April 2027
  • ISBN: 9781529990027
  • Imprint: Transworld Digital
  • Format: Audio Download
  • RRP: $34.99
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About the author

Johnny Gaunt

Johnny Gaunt was born in Rotherham, South Yorkshire. His past occupations have included scrapyard worker, roofer, night-shift garage attendant, door-to-door salesman, call-centre operative, and member of a railway gang. He now works within the NHS. He has a degree in English Literature and Philosophy from the University of Sheffield and a MA in Creative Writing from Manchester Metropolitan University. Offcumden is his first novel, and won The Literary Consultancy PEN Factor Prize in 2022. He has lived in London, Wales and the Channel Islands, but now resides in Western Scotland with his wife and two daughters.
JG

Praise for Offcumden

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

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

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

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'