Full Immersion
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- £5.49
Publisher Description
**FINALIST for the BSF Award for Best Horror, 2023**
A traumatised woman with amnesia finds her own dead body and sets out to uncover the truth of her demise in a race against time, sanity, crumbling realities and the ever-present threat of the Silhouette.
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What can you do when you’re reeling from trauma but you’ve tried it all? Counselling, yoga, pills, meditation, art, healthy living… none of it makes a dent. What’s left?
Magpie is out of ideas. She’s desperate enough to try anything. Just when she thinks her life can get no worse, she discovers herself, or rather her own dead body, partially buried in the mudbank of a river. A man stands by, a familiar stranger. What does he want? And why can’t she remember getting here? Why can’t she remember anything?
Unbeknownst to her, two pairs of eyes watch from behind an observation screen, in a room filled with computers and sensors. An experiment is unfolding, but is Magpie the subject, or practitioner? Reality becomes a slippery concept. And beyond the glass is something worse still: a hint of an outline, shaped in darkness…
Magpie realises all too soon that her journey has transformed from healing to survival. She must become the hunter rather than the hunted, with her missing memories the prey.
In turn brutal, beautiful and absolutely terrifying, Full Immersion is the latest speculative horror from Bram Stoker Award-nominated author, Gemma Amor
File Under: Horror Fantasy [ Silhouette | Suspension | Bristol | Motherhood ]
**Content Warnings** suicidal ideation; post-natal depression; implied acts of violence towards a child; birth scene
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This anguished psychological horror novel from Amor (Six Rooms) begins with a letter from the protagonist, Magpie, to researchers in "The Department of Virtual and Experimental Therapy" at the University of Bristol, begging for help in avoiding suicide. When Magpie then discovers her own bedraggled corpse in the mud by the river, it launches her on an investigation—though readers are aware that her body is actually being tended in a university lab, her consciousness monitored by scientists. Within the virtual-reality world, a Psych in the guise of a friendly stranger leads Magpie to face events from her past that have contributed to her current despair. What the scientists don't realize, however, is that Magpie's creative intelligence is beginning to interact with the program's code, enabling her to take charge of the narrative. The scientists, too smug in their presumed control of the process, see that the Psych is going off-script, but they don't notice how their own space is being invaded by threatening darkness. Magpie may break free from her own despair, but what will happen if it escapes into the world around her? Amor writes passionately and convincingly about Magpie's pain. The result is a bleak but powerful portrait of survival at any cost.
