The Teardrop Method

The Teardrop Method by Simon Avery is the fourth in TTA Press's Novella series (previous titles are Eyepennies by Mike O'Driscoll, the award-winning Spin by Nina Allan, and Cold Turkey by Carole Johnstone, all available on this site). It contains a bonus linked short story, 'Going Back to the World'.

Krisztina heard the song and she followed it across the city...

Winter in Budapest. In the midst of a terrible personal tragedy, singer/songwriter Krisztina Ligetti discovers she can hear songs of mortality. She spends her days following these songs until they lead her to people at the precipice of death. From the fading bars of their final breath, Krisztina takes the story of their lives and turns them into music.

When Krisztina is reunited with her father, a reclusive 60s pop star, she believes that she has finally found a way out of the darkness, but then she begins to receive news clippings detailing each of the deaths she has been witness to. A man in a porcelain mask who seems to be everywhere she looks and a faded writer who shares Krisztina's gift seem to know her, know that the past has a hold on them all, and that it won't stop until someone has paid the price.

"The Teardrop Method is a story about stories; a beautiful novella about love and loss and the connections people make and then sometimes break. It's quiet, haunting, and ultimately moving" Gary McMahon

"Nightmare plotting infused with an aching mitteleuropäische sadness, Simon Avery’s tale of music and mortality could be the novelisation of a lost Argento movie" Nicholas Royle

"Without any prep or background, I started reading the novella The Teardrop Method by British author Simon Avery, and was immediately engaged by the moodiness, the bleakness, the desperation and creaky, world-weariness of the setting and characters. These appealing elements perfectly coalesced into a tragic and fervent eulogy to the creative process -- to Art with a capital A -- as a means of salvation and transcendence and doom, and to love itself in all its complex iterations, exploring the concept of loving, dying, and even killing, in order to achieve the proper reception code from the eternal Muse while the roaring Danube drowns out the rest of the world. This is a very European story, in all its faded baroque finery and cafe claustrophobia. The snow is heavier here, the dawn ever more surprising. The supernatural and the natural are not so far removed in places like this. The old and the new forever caught in a twirling waltz. I highly recommend this novella, and cannot wait to see what melody Mr Avery pens next. I'll be listening" T.E. Grau

"A monumentally haunting novella" Des Lewis

“Simon Avery’s descriptions of Krysztina’s music makes me want to hear it. It’s a subtle and beautifully told tale with echoes of European film-makers like Haneke and Kieslowski, as well as their predecessors like Franju and Polanski. It conjures a powerful sense of foreboding that reminds me of Roeg’s Don’t Look Now, and shares with that film a sense of being haunted. It has moments of profound sadness and yet still managed to surprise me with its uplifting ending. One of the novellas of the year” Mike O'Driscoll

“A dark and tense thriller, set against a cold Hungarian backdrop. The reconnection between father and daughter gives The Teardrop Method melancholy in light of the father’s declining health, and the handling of the supernatural element is done so latently it feels authentic and genuinely spooky. The prose is compulsively readable and even the stranger members of the cast pop off the page” Nick Cato, The Horror Fiction Review

“A quintessential TTA novella: horror with a vein of oddness that runs through it; a strange story where the protagonist hears the song that precedes a person’s death. With vivid descriptions of Budapest, it all helps to create a wholly believable narrative. Recommended, especially if you’re a fan of Dario Argento” Christopher Teague