Mark Timlin is a British author best known for his series of novels featuring Nick Sharman, a former Metropolitan Police officer who takes up the profession of private investigator in South London. He is also a renowned book reviewer and literary commentator. His most recent work is REAP THE WHIRLWIND. In his early years he did various jobs including work as a member of the road crew for THE WHO, including working backstage at Woodstock in the 1960s on the lighting cranes
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Harrow Lake. A town preserved in aspic since the nineteen twenties, after the town was decimated by a natural disaster: A landslide and flood that left many dead. Then it became the location of the smash hit horror film Nightjar. The town never seems to change, to join the world in the Twenty-First century. There it sits, literally in the middle of nowhere. One road in, one road out. No mobile phone access. No TV, no Wi-Fi. Hell on earth.
Then the director of the film, Nolan Nox, is attacked and hospitalised. On his orders, his assistant, Larry, sends his daughter Lola to the town where her only relative, her grandmother, still lives, just as the annual Nightjar town festival begins. And that’s how this strange horror novel begins.
But first, a word about the movie Nightjar. Set in Harrow Lake, as I said, it tells the story of Little Bird, played by Lorelei Nox, Lola’s mother, who is killed by the inhabitants of the town when it is cut off from civilisation, and the townsfolk are starving, and blaming Little Bird’s flirtatious ways for their predicament. So, they eat her.
Lola walks into a video nasty of her own as she explores the town dressed in one of her mother’s costumes from the film, after her bag mysteriously disappeared. Then, for the first time she learns about Mr Jitters, who was buried alive after the town disaster, and turned cannibal. Some say he never died, and haunts the forest outside Harrow Lake to this day. And then there’s the mysterious girl following her. And then there’s the bug models in her bedroom that seem to come alive. And all the scratch marks everywhere in the same room, that was once her mother’s. Spooky, or what? And the last nail in her particular coffin, is that any young girl who looks like Night Bird seems to vanish without trace, and of course she’s the spitting image of Lorelei.
Kat Ellis has learned her rhythm and blues from King and Koontz. And that’s no criticism. In fact, it’s a compliment. Harrow Lake is a terrific crime/horror novel that doesn’t go away when the really gripping finale reveals all, as all good gothic novels should. Congratulations to Kat. Looking forward to the next one!
