They’ve engaged Pollard, a local builder, for the job of knocking down the wall between the two cottages but the wall’s proving recalcitrant, refusing to budge. Rowena and Douglas are renovating his mother’s cottage next door to their own having packed her off to live with her god-daughter in Scotland. Set in the early ’60s in Crowsley Beck ‘twenty miles from Piccadilly Circus’ much like Letchmore Heath, the location for the film of John Wyndam’s horror The Midwich Cuckoos, where Briscoe spent her first few years, Touched is about the Crales who have just moved into the village. It’s not a genre to which I’m drawn but writers like these catch my eye and as I’m a great fan of Joanna Briscoe’s elegant thriller Sleep with Me, Touched, their latest offering, seemed right up my alley. I also have Julie Myerson’s The Quickening in my TBR pile. I’ve already read Helen Dunmore’s The Greatcoat, a subtle, beautifully written ghost story set in the early ‘50s close to an aerodrome used in the War, and Jeanette Winterson’s The Daylight Gate about the Pendle witches which was a little too blood-and-guts for me with its descriptions of torture and violence, although I should have known what I was letting myself in for. They’re all either horror or ghost stories – hardly a surprise given the connotations of the name – but what is surprising are some of the authors they’ve commissioned to write for them. A few years ago Random House began publishing novellas under the Hammer imprint.
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