‘The Street’ – Garry Douglas (Grafton Books)

Page Count: 236 Pages

There’s me going on about how I can’t finish any books, at the moment, and I completely forgot that I’d actually finished a whole load (during the hiatus) and put them one side, especially for a situation like this. You can blame my memory on last week, probably this coming week as well (I think it’s going to be a rough one). But anyway…

Regular visitors to the blog will know that’s there nothing I love more than rooting around in big piles of books found in second-hand bookshops. It’s like searching for buried treasure and you never know what else you’ll find during the hunt. When I was in the Faction Bookshop, a few months ago, I never expected to come across ‘The Street’ but the line on the cover about ‘The black tarmac is boiling for revenge’ caught my eye and the blurb on the back left me with no choice but to make the purchase. Have a read and tell me that you wouldn’t have done the same…

Angry Asphalt…

The roads that made up the new Diamond Estate were all named after gems. There was Emerald Avenue, Ruby Close, Garnet Crescent… And Bloodstone Street.

It started on the day that the Peters family moved in. Patty was lying in the road and when her father made her get up, her body left a damp imprint in the asphalt.

“Look Daddy,” she said, “the street is crying.”

But within days, the tarmac was bubbling with a malevolent will of its own, sucking at the feet of unwary pedestrians, chopping at the arms of maintenance workers and redirecting the wheels of speeding cars.

The residents of Bloodstone Street had moved into open plan suburbia, only to find themselves trapped in a cul-de-sac of terror…

See what I mean..? The guy who wrote the blurb clearly had as much fun writing it as Garry Douglas (better known as Garry Kilworth) did writing the book itself. I had to give it a go and I’m very glad I did.

The plot itself is very basic and reminiscent of any number of horror books or movies. Revenge is being sought from beyond the grave and supernatural violence will be wrought on those who thought they had got away with it. That’s it, that’s the whole plot (along with a bunch of innocent bystanders caught in the crossfire) and it’s not doing anything new here. Actually, that’s not quite true. The sub-plot around the coven getting it completely wrong, and going after the wrong person entirely, made me laugh out loud and Douglas handles it just right with the coven being completely unable to understand that their enemy is literally right beneath their feet…

But who really cares about the plot when this avatar of revenge is cast in the form of actual freshly laid tarmac? Not this reader. The concept caught my eye right away and I came running to see if it would live up to the blurb. I’m very pleased to say that it really does. Douglas makes it work by chucking everything he has at the concept, resulting in something larger than life and utterly relentless bearing down on the not so innocent; kind of like the Blob but intelligent rather than just hungry. You can feel how terrifying it is to its victims but only for a short while… You know what I mean…

There’s not really much more to say other than that if you want to read some horror, this Halloween, that really is one of kind in it’s concept (happy to be proved wrong because quite frankly, I want more ‘tarmac horror’ in my TBR pile) then you absolutely must read ‘The Street’. I was lucky enough to pick up my copy for a pound but if Amazon and eBay are anything to go by, your best bet is to grab the eBook (search for it under ‘Garry Kilworth’) for £1.99. You’re welcome 😉