Just a wee teaser for next year’s novel–

In the beginning–if there could be said to have been one–no one really understood what had happened. There was a decade of confusion. Populations declined across the board, as you would expect given the accompanying economic changes. All along the coast the little places that had made an income from retirees and weekenders–from tourism in general, from a proximity to remnant medieval priories or bijou nature reserves compiled out of two or three acres of hawthorn scrub, a pond and the possible presence of a locally occurring frog–fell in on themselves. By the time things came back into focus, the climate had changed. Geography had changed. Everyone had a different idea about that. The internet was patchy and undependable; and though the war with the aliens continued, people could never agree on what kind of a war it was, or what its boundaries were.

Coastal time always lags behind. In places like this one–which had previously thought of itself as a convenient weekend refuge two hours drive south-east of the Square Mile, comprising a couple of pubs, a terrace of flint-faced alms houses and a Queen Anne vicarage, organised around a small but somehow spacious square–it seemed to stretch out and pass even more slowly than before. The cemetery, like an old walled garden, abutted the vicarage; behind both, the original cobbled jitties ran down through a break in the cliffs to where a local river drained itself across a wide, flat, muddy, windswept inlet. Not quite a beach but perfect for dog walkers. Towards the end of the 1970s, the alms houses had been knocked together into a Museum of the Sea, featuring objects netted unintentionally by trawlers working the Dogger Bank; thereafter, the relaxed spaces of the original village were quickly infilled by a town’s worth of gift shops, delis and minimarts; while retirement suburbs stealthily surrounded both.

During the arrival of the aliens, the river had swept down through the upstream golf course, carrying away garden fences and clumps of pampas grass, leaving behind tangles of blanched and broken branches, plastic bags, used condoms, sewage outfall, broken toys and garden furniture from the dwellings upstream. No one had ever cleaned up; and the suburbs, previously running all the way down to the petrol coloured water, now ended twenty or thirty yards further inland, having ceded themselves to a mudbank out of which surviving homes emerged empty and stripped clean. Tucked in next to them, where the land climbed cliffs and grassy ramps towards the downland, half a dozen Edwardian detached houses–each comprising three apartments with large rooms and sea views, still weathertight and comfortable–watched the bay from an ancient alluvial bench.

Early evening. A car arrived by the river, worked its way carefully along the unadopted road that served the houses, and stopped. A figure not unlike a child got out and began dancing. A voice called, “Get back in here.” A curious light lay across the inlet, glancing off the river, which had fanned out exhaustedly and become so shallow it might have been a coat of varnish applied between the low darkening cliffs. Flakes of what looked like snow flurried across the mud, driving the little figure to run about shouting and splashing, stopping suddenly at intervals to stare back at its own footprints filling with water. Every so often it bent forward from its hips with its face thrust forward and its arms spread out and back as if it imagined itself in flight. Eventually the adult took hold of it by one arm and dragged it back to the car. A rear door slammed and locked. “Don’t touch anything or I’ll shoot you,” the adult warned, and made his way towards the houses, where the lights were already on and music could be heard. Everything looked as if it were being viewed from the wrong distance, like a scene in a film.

–-The End of Everything, Serpent’s Tail, June 2026

© M John Harrison, 2025