The Stone Tide

A man moves his family to the seaside only to have his fixer-upper house test his marriage and local history test his sanity in this "ghost story of time, place and imagination in turns spooky, funny, thought-provoking, educating and entertaining" (Vic Templar, author of Taking Candy from a Dog).
"[A] wryly autofictional successor to Marshland. . . . Simultaneously quotidian and grotesque, The Stone Tide is the funniest, most readable, most intelligently self-searching book I've read in years." —M John Harrison, author of Light

When Gareth E. Rees moves to a dilapidated Victorian house in Hastings he begins to piece together an occult puzzle connecting Aleister Crowley, John Logie Baird and the Piltdown Man hoaxer. As freak storms and tidal surges ravage the coast, Rees is beset by memories of his best friend's tragic death in St Andrews twenty years earlier. Convinced that apocalypse approaches and his past is out to get him, Rees embarks on a journey away from his family, deep into history and to the very edge of the imagination. Tormented by possessed seagulls, mutant eels and unresolved guilt, how much of reality can he trust?

The Stone Tide is a novel about grief, loss, history and the imagination. It is about how people make the place and the place makes the person. Above all it is about the stories we tell to make sense of the world.

"Puts the 'psycho' into psychogeography." —Andrew Weatherall
"Remorselessly entertaining. Gareth E. Rees' East Sussex occult odyssey gives the bloated corpse of the mid-life crisis memoir a salty seaside French kiss of life." —Ben Thompson
"A hallucinatory piece of work. . . . The Stone Tide is a strange and memorable adventure." —Literary Review (UK)