Tartarus: A Victorian Monster Story

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Overview

What if you really did have monsters at the bottom of your garden?


When Hope's reclusive uncle Howard, returned from years of Army service in India, invites the family to visit his remote house on the coast of Ireland, her parents are glad to leave London, where Hope's affair with a cavalry officer risks bringing them into disgrace.


But Howard is not there to greet them. The house is barricaded with no indication of where he might be.


While her father attempts to maintain a sense of normality for her mother and brother's sakes, Hope hunts for Howard with the local coach driver who is pursuing her. And what they find is much worse than they'd feared.


Length: 67,000 words

ISBN (ebook): 978-0-9869048-3-7

ISBN (print): 978-0-9869048-4-4


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Author Notes

This book was inspired by horror stories of the early 20th century from writers such as Lovecraft and Hodgson. I'm not sure how well the style works today but I'm fond of the old tropes of modern characters finding records of past horrors and remote houses where horrible monsters live underground.


I originally wrote it as a low-budget horror screenplay, but as it became more complex the budget soon rose beyond what anyone I knew could afford to shoot and it sat on my hard drive for years until I decided to rewrite it as a novel. I've fixed the problems I found in the process and it's become a rather different story, but the basic plot is still there.


I hope people find it interesting. If so, I may well have to write a prequel, covering Uncle Howard's experiences in Afghanistan.