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From a new voice in horror comes a satirical Rosemary's Baby for our conspiratorial present in which anti-capitalist activists unwittingly unleash staggering 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 labour. 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 is a ruthlessly funny new voice in horror: as adept at skewering today's plutocratic overlords as he is at conjuring our most primeval nightmares.
"This refreshingly modern spin on the infernal child theme deserves to stand beside such genre classics as Rosemary's Baby and The Omen." —Publishers Weekly
"What would happen if Rosemary's baby belonged to Patty Hearst? An absolute blast (in more ways than one). I tore through this devilishly delightful, razor-sharp treat and enjoyed every minute." —Jennifer Thorne, author of Diavola
"Enthralling, terrifying and endlessly surprising." —M. R. Carey, author of The Girl with all the Gifts
This information about The Captive was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Kit Burgoyne is the horror fiction pen name of Ned Beauman, who was named one of Granta's Twenty Best of Young British Novelists in 2013, and is the author of Boxer, Beetle (winner of the Goldberg Prize for Outstanding Debut Fiction); The Teleportation Accident (longlisted for the Man Booker Prize and winner of the Somerset Maugham Award); Glow; Madness Is Better than Defeat; and Venomous Lumpsucker (winner of the Arthur C. Clarke Award). He has written for the New York Times, The Guardian, the London Review of Books, and Esquire. He lives in London. The Captive is his first novel as Kit Burgoyne.
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