The Return

by David A. Riley

It was never going to be easy to return for one last look at the streets where he spent his childhood years. Even knowing this, Gary still felt he had to make the effort, just this once, to see if they were really as bad as he remembered. In a few months demolition was due to start on Grudge End…When Gary Morgan travels north to lie low after a gangland shooting in London, a childhood friend is violently maimed within hours of his arrival. Decades after escaping the blight of his hometown, he finds himself ensnared in a place he hates more than any other.Feuding families, bloodthirsty syndicates, and hostile forces older than mankind all play a role in the escalating chaos surrounding Gary Morgan. Now he must unravel the mysteries of Grudge End and his own past or meet his doom in the grip of an ancient, unimaginable evil.David A. Riley began writing horror stories while still at school and had his first professional sale in 1969. His work has appeared in numerous anthologies including The Eleventh Pan Book of Horror Stories and The Century’s Best Horror Fiction, and also in magazines such as World of Horror, Fear, Whispers, Fantasy Tales, Dark Discoveries and Lovecraft eZine. His short fiction is collected in His Own Mad Dark Tales from David A. Riley and The Lurkers in the Abyss & Other Tales of Terror. A founding member of the British Fantasy Society, he and his wife now run a bookshop in Oswaldtwistle, Lancashire.

Genres: Horror

272 pages, Paperback

First published September 24, 2013

About the author

David A. Riley writes horror, fantasy and SF stories. In 1995, along with his wife, Linden, he edited and published a fantasy/SF magazine, Beyond. His first professionally published story was in the 11th Pan Book of Horror in 1970. This was reprinted in 2012 in The Century's Best Horror Fiction edited by John Pelan for Cemetery Dance. He has had numerous stories published by Doubleday, DAW, Corgi, Sphere, Roc, Playboy Paperbacks, Robinsons, etc., and in magazines such as Aboriginal Science Fiction, Dark Discoveries, Fear, Fantasy Tales. His first collection of stories (4 long stories and a novelette) was published by Hazardous Press in 2012, His Own Mad Demons. A Lovecraftian novel, The Return, was published by Blood Bound Books in the States in 2013. A second collection of his stories, all of which were professionally published prior to 2000, The Lurkers in the Abyss & Other Tales of Terror, was launched at the World Fantasy Convention in 2013. His fantasy novel, Goblin Mire, was published by Parallel Universe Publications in 2015. Their Cramped Dark World is his third collection of short stories. With his wife, Linden, he runs a small press called Parallel Universe Publications, which has so far published ten books. His stories have been translated into Italian, German, Spanish and Russian.

Reviews

[Darrell Grizzle · Rating 5 out of 5]

A gritty noir novel that combines the best elements of crime fiction with genuinely frightening Lovecraftian horror.

[Craig Herbertson · Rating 4 out of 5]

Mr. Fosset, making a brief appearance in this work by David A. Riley says "Dark, bleak, nihilistic stuff. Not the kind of thing to take to bed for a good night's sleep." Admirably summarizing this new work by a veteran author who many horror aficionados will have encountered in the legendary Pan Horror series and subsequent `best of' collections. There is a reason why I mention' best of'. Riley has produced some fine short stories and I was curious as to how his undoubted skill as a short story author would translate on the wider screen

The answer is very well. Fans of Grudge End, a horrible place full of horrible places, will lap this up. "Even in bright daylight the five-storey building looked dark, forbidding, and sordidly utilitarian." - a good description of Riley's bleak uncompromising prose - sparse, economical and clinically scary.

Riley has produced one of his marvelous anti-heroes in Gary Morgan. I won't go too much into plot because a large part of this work is dependent on a slow build up of dark energies contained in the utterly mundane. Gary is not what he seems and the reader will be surprised that at the conclusion of this story you'll find yourself drawn to a real sympathy with the character.

A thoroughly enjoyable read and I would ignore Mr. Fossett and start it late at night.. You'll finish before dawn...I hope

The cover is plendidly illustrated by Andrej Bartulovic

[TKBoss · Rating 5 out of 5]

To paraphrase Shakespeare, there is something rotten in the Northern English town of Edgebottom, especially within the district of the appropriately named Grudge End. The ground there is sour, cursed for centuries perhaps. The powerful Malleson family have owned the now derelict mill at the epicentre of the area for decades, a family with some twisted secrets of their own. Over the years, countless horrors have occurred in Grudge End; brutal ritualistic murders, whole families massacred with their heads removed, and many others driven to insanity and suicide by the catalogue of ghastly events there.
Gary Morgan is a man with a rather shady past, to say the least. He grew up in Grudge End and when he was a teenager his drunken brute of a father was viciously butchered in what was believed by many locals to be an occult-related murder. Although having moved away from the area for quite some time, Gary’s own life has been shrouded with criminal connections and several failed marriages. He decides to return to his home town for one last time before the streets and mills where he spent his youth are pulled down for good. And to escape the clutches of some quite nasty London-based gangsters as well.
On his return, Gary bumps into an old school friend of his, Kevin Cross, whose increasingly manic paranoia surrounding ‘something’ in town is just the tip of the very dark iceberg of what is to follow. When Kevin has his arm savagely hacked off by a mysterious assailant, a series of events begin to unravel, all connected to Gary, the vile Malleson family, and the deep, ancient secrets of Edgebottom. As the bodies begin to mount up and the baffled police close in, something very Old is awakening from a long slumber…
Bloody hell, it really is grim up north! And down south in London too, it appears. Author David A. Riley presents us with an extremely violent, bleak, fantastically weaved tale that could perhaps best be described as H.P. Lovecraft meets the Kray twins via the kitchen sink British realism films of the late 1950s/early ‘60s. It is gloriously dark in Edgebottom, literally and figuratively, from the highly sinister occult goings-on, to the East End gangsters out for their pound of flesh. Even the weather here is persistently miserable, with its torrential rain, bitter coldness and overcast skies.
Riley’s story is expertly created throughout, with the narrative point-of-view seamlessly switching between the main protagonist, the investigating police detectives, the gangsters, and so on. The building tension and mystery surrounding the town is both gripping and morbidly fascinating. When the real horror kicks in around the second half of the book, the appearance of the satyr-esque being is indeed a sight to behold. A truly terrifying, seemingly unstoppable creation of pure unadulterated evil.
There are the aforementioned homages to Lovecraft, more so towards the end, however these slide in perfectly to the rest of Riley’s tale, one that would still stand strong on its own even without the Lovecraftian influences.
A definite recommendation for fans of grim horror and HPL alike.

The Return is published by Blood Bound Books (www.bloodgutsandstory.com) and is available to purchase from Amazon, Barnes & Noble and other retailers.

Trevor Kennedy for Phantasmagoria Magazine.

[Chris Noble · Rating 3 out of 5]

This starts strong, reminding me of Jamie Delano’s Hellblazer stories back in the day: dark, seedy, and filled with highly questionable people. As it goes on, it gets a bit more pulpy, but still fun. Doesn’t quite pull through in the third act. I think, in order to do truly “weird” fiction, you need to be at least a little insane in order to really communicate the kind of dread of “The King in Yellow”, or “The House on the Borderland. Otherwise, the Great Old Ones just turn into giant squiddy monsters. King can do it, of course. I think David Lynch and Mark Frost did it, with “Twin Peaks”. I don’t think this does it. Still and all, a fun pulpy story.

[Doug Draa · Rating 4 out of 5]

Folks, if you are only going to buy one book right now then this is it!

You don't even have to be a "Mythos" fan to receive maximum enjoyment!

David A. Riley's "The Return" is an amazing read. Do you like gritty noir? Brit Horror? Masculine (but not macho) protagonists? Eldritch Horror in bleak industrial slums? "The Long Good Friday" meets "the Mythos"? The writing is dense and sleek. Never boring enthralling page turners. Do you like to read just a few more pages even though you need to sleep? Then this is THE BOOK!

I read this in record time. What is amazing is that you get over 270 pages of story. There's no fluff or padding. Every single word is dedicated to moving the plot along. Mr. Riley doesn't waste one single word.
And what a plot it is.
Gary Morgan, a mob enforcer on the run, returns to his hometown of Edgebottom to visit the neighborhood he grew up in. The now abondoned mill quarter of "Grudge End". "Grudge End" was a nest of dispair, pain, deprivity,violence, and eldritch horror.

I won't give anything away, but once Gary returns homes, things go from being bad, but managable, to becoming a waking nightmare as forces from beyond both the law and reality as we know it set their sights on Gary.

THIS IS ONE FINE HORROR NOVEL!