The Boat House

✍ Scribed by Gallagher, Stephen

• Book ID: 107751270
• Publisher: Brooligan Press
• Year: 1991
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 164 KB
• Category: Fiction

✦ Synopsis

A dark love story, and a disturbing tale of a divided soul. In the days leading to the fall of the Soviet empire, a young woman with a deadly secret slips unnoticed into the West. And when Alina Petrovna first appears in Three Oaks Bay it's clear that her frail, luminous beauty is likely to cause some ripples in the surface calm of the peaceful resort town.

For Pete McCarthy, the boatyard worker who gives her shelter, she's an enigma. A complex, well-meaning young woman with a difficult past. Someone whose mystery deepens as the season gets under way, and the deaths by drowning begin...

"Gallagher handles the balance between mundane reality and stomach-turning horror with reassurance and offers a nicely twisted ending to boot. Highly recommended." Nigel Kendall, Time Out

"A master of pace and suspense, Gallagher has the dark, neon-splashed imagination of a true original." Glasgow Evening Times

"Perhaps the finest contemporary British thriller writer." GQ

"Stephen Gallagher has carved a highly individual niche with his distinctly psychological approach to the genre... THE BOAT HOUSE is a richly layered and absorbing story." Yorkshire Evening Post

"The finest British writer of bestselling popular fiction since le Carre... Gallagher, like le Carre, is a novelist whose themes seem to reflect something of the essence of our times, and a novelist whose skill lies in embedding those themes in accessible plots." The Independent

Review

For those of you yet to experience the joys of one of Stephen Gallaghers fine, fine novels, this is the place to start. Gallagher has been criminally underrated for the better part of two decades now and you really owe it to yourself to see what youve been missing. Its only in the past few years that the rest of the mainstream popular novelists have been coming anywhere close to his fiction ... think Straub meets Harris, and youre partway to getting an idea of what he`s about.

THE BOAT HOUSE is a cunning tale set around the Lake District, telling the story of a mysterious stranger who arrives and quietly causes the inhabitants of Three Oaks Bay (the setting of the story) to start losing members of their family in the lake. Brilliantly written, with Gallaghers uncanny knack for showing us abnormal psychology again in evidence, this is a story that lingers long after the pages are closed. Youll want to return to this one time and time again ...

Unhesitatingly recommended ... and a snip at the Amazon price. Stick it in your shopping bag now.

(Amazon review for the paperback edition)

From the Author

In 1984 I travelled to Leningrad, got hepatitis, and reimagined The Little Mermaid as an English landscape horror story. This was the result.

If you reckon it's not the work of a well person, I can only agree.