The Captive
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- 119,00 kr
Publisher Description
From a new voice in horror comes a satirical Rosemary’s Baby for our conspiratorial present in which anti-capitalist activists unwittingly unleash terrifying demonic forces when they kidnap a pregnant heiress.
From Ned Beauman, the Man Booker Prize–longlisted author of The Teleportation Accident and Clarke Award–winning author of Venomous Lumpsucker.
For months, Luke and his underground revolutionary group have been planning their biggest operation yet: kidnapping 23-year-old Adeline Woolsaw. They don’t want a ransom—they want to expose the Woolsaw Group, the source of Adeline’s parents’ enormous wealth, a vast yet largely anonymous company that runs everything from military bases and mental hospitals to commuter trains, call centers, and prisons.
But the revolutionaries get a shock when they bundle Adeline into their van. She’s about to go into labor. And she may not object to being kidnapped, if it allows her and the baby to escape her despotic parents.
It quickly becomes apparent that this is no ordinary child. He’s capable of setting off deadly weather events and summoning plagues of vermin. And that’s just the beginning. Luke discovers that Adeline’s parents engineered the pregnancy as part of a dark bargain with an ancient evil of nearly limitless power. Now the Woolsaws and their henchmen will stop at nothing to get the infant back, so they can establish an infernal new kingdom on Earth with their grandchild on the throne.
Kit Burgoyne (pen name of Booker–listed author Ned Beauman) is a ruthlessly funny new voice in horror: witty, appalling, and as adept at skewering today’s plutocratic overlords as he is at conjuring our most primeval nightmares.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
A kidnapping scheme goes horribly awry in this witty supernatural thrill ride, the first horror outing from Burgoyne (The Teleportation Accident, written as Ned Beauman). Anticapitalist collective the Nail is intent on exposing the perfidy of the Woolsaw Group, "the largest public service outsourcing company in the UK," whom they blame for increasing the misery of the populace. New recruit Luke has an especially personal grievance: his sister died in a Woolsaw Group–controlled mental health institution. The Nail plots to abduct Adeline Woolsaw, heir to her family's empire, and hold her for ransom, not realizing that she is heavily pregnant. Mere hours after the kidnapping, Adeline gives birth to Percy, an infant with unpredictable and uncanny powers. She's willing to collaborate with the Nail to keep Percy from her parents, who have diabolical plans for their grandchild and plenty of resources to track him down. Burgoyne keeps the action brisk and the repartee sharp in the ensuing game of cat-and-mouse, as Luke and his Nail-mates realize the potential to weaponize Percy's talents and the Woolsaws resort to increasingly desperate stratagems that invite scathing satire of their plutocratic overreach. This refreshingly modern spin on the infernal child theme deserves to stand beside such genre classics as Rosemary's Baby and The Omen.
