Stephen Gregory (1952-2023) was born in Derby, England, and earned a degree in law from the University of London. He worked as a teacher for ten years in various places, including Wales, Algeria, and Sudan, before moving to the mountains of Snowdonia in Wales to write his first novel, The Cormorant (1986), which won Britain's prestigious Somerset Maugham Award and drew comparisons to Poe. The book was also adapted for film as a BBC production starring Ralph Fiennes. Two more novels, both set in Wales, followed: The Woodwitch (1988) and The Blood of Angels (1994). After the publication of The Blood of Angels, he worked in Hollywood for a year with Oscar-winning director William Friedkin (The Exorcist). Later in life he returned to publishing after a long absence and released a new trio of avian horror novels, The Waking That Kills, Wakening the Crow, and Plague of Gulls. His short fiction is collected in On Dark Wings, available from Valancourt Books. He died in 2023.

The Waking That Kills by Stephen Gregory

Answering an ad for a job as live-in tutor to a teenage boy, Christopher Beal arrives at the big, old house deep in the woods with no idea what he's getting into. His pupil is Lawrence Lundy, an odd boy who practices strange rituals by moonlight and is haunted – perhaps literally – by the spirit of his dead father. For mysterious reasons, his mother, Juliet, keeps him at home, isolated from the world. During the suffocating heat of a long summer, Christopher finds himself entangled in the madness of this strange household and must uncover a deadly secret, before it's too late ...

The Waking That Kills is a spellbinding novel of psychological horror by one of the genre's finest contemporary practitioners, Stephen Gregory, award-winning author of the modern classic The Cormorant.

 

REVIEWS

  • "An insidious novel that gets under your skin and itches insatiably from within."

    – Tor.com

  • "Gregory's voice and vision are wholly original."

    – Ramsey Campbell

  • "Gregory writes with the hypnotic power of Poe."

    – Publishers Weekly
 

BOOK PREVIEW

Excerpt

PROLOGUE

'Lawrence Lundy,' my father said, blurring the words oddly in his mouth.

Then, to try and remember where he'd heard the name before, he pretended, with an invisible chisel in one hand and an invisible hammer in the other, to carve it onto an invisible gravestone. He stared at the empty space, reading and re-­reading the letters as he cut them.

This time it didn't come back to him.

He'd always said he had a head for names: he'd been a monumental mason for forty years, staring at a name for hours on end as he cut it into the stone. He claimed he could remember exactly where and when he'd carved each one.

But this one wouldn't come.

'Lawrence Lundy,' he said, and he started to carve the name again, shaping each letter with his lips as he tapped it carefully, painstakingly, into thin air with his invisible tools.

I told him it didn't matter, but he ignored me. He carried on working, in the same way he'd ignored me when, as a boy, I'd sat with him on a frosty morning in a country churchyard or a hot afternoon in a military cemetery. I watched him. He seemed to have forgotten I was there, although I'd flown over seven thousand miles to visit him. I imagined I could hear in my head the knock of the hammer on the handle of the chisel, the nick of the blade into stone.

The room was small and stuffy, already cluttered with the few books and pictures he'd managed to bring with him. It smelled of him and his clothes, although he'd been there less than a fortnight and the window was wide open. There was an impressive view: the nursing home was on the promenade and his room was on the top floor. For a man who'd worked outside since the day he'd left school, suddenly confined in such a narrow space, it was good that he'd be able to breathe the sharp salt air and watch the changing moods of the estuary.

Now, quite oblivious of me, he was still chipping away. He was tall and very thin, all bumpy joints and jutting angles; strong fingers with swollen knuckles, horny nails, glasses slipping to the end of a bony nose . . . my stricken father, mouthing the letters of a name he'd heard somewhere but couldn't quite remember.

He looked very tired. His face, indeed his whole demeanour, was lopsided. He'd tried talking to me, but his tongue was wet and heavy. He'd listened to my brief account of another year overseas and my plan for the summer. When I told him I was going to stay not far away, that I'd taken a tutoring job for a couple of months and could come into town by bus to see him every week, he'd rummaged in his bedside drawer and pulled out a ring of keys.

'Use the car,' he mumbled, and when he saw me wince at the suggestion, he shrugged and added, 'See if she'll start, take her round the block a couple of times, it's up to you.' He pressed the keys into my hand, and in doing so he held my fingers between his. 'So soft,' he smiled, 'not a day's work in all your life.'

His eyes were drooping. A trickle of saliva shone on his chin. I stood up and made softly for the door, meaning to let myself out and tiptoe down the corridor.

But he heard me and shook himself awake again. He stared at me as though I'd just come into the room and he didn't know who I was. Startled, smearing at his mouth with the back of his hand, he tried to say that name again. For a moment, as he blinked at me in bewilderment, he seemed to think that I, a stranger he'd never seen before, was Lawrence Lundy. And suddenly – I could see from a flicker of fear in his eyes – suddenly he remembered the name . . . yes, he knew it, he'd seen it somewhere, he'd read it somewhere, and at last it had come back to him.

But his tongue and his lips refused to work. He writhed in his chair, infuriated, impotent.

'No, Dad, it's me,' I said, 'it's me, it's Christopher,' and I moved across the room again, to try and calm him.

He recoiled from my touch. His face twisted into a grimace of revulsion. 'Bad boy . . . bad boy . . .' he was blubbering through numb, wet lips, and he squirmed away from me.

I left. And as I closed the door and moved along the corridor, I could still hear him trying to get the words out, spluttering with anger and frustration.