ShoreZone

by David Rudkin

Nine enigmatic, chilling and moving short tales in this first ever collection from David Rudkin, writer of Penda’s Fen, The Ash Tree, Artemis 81 and numerous other television and stage productions.

Available in a strictly limited, high quality hardback edition of 500.

264 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2025

About the author

British playwright for theatre, film, television, and radio.

Reviews

[Jacob Blanchet · Rating 5 out of 5]

The title story alone is one of the greatest things I’ve read in a long time. The whole collection is top notch. Wouldn’t expect any less from the mind behind the enigmatic and beautiful Penda’s Fen.

[Zach · Rating 5 out of 5]

For those who know, David Rudkin is most famous for scripting the 1970s teleplay Penda's Fen, one of my 100 favorite films. (He also scripted A Ghost Story for Christmas: The Ash Tree; a Thomas Hardy adaptation, Leap in the Dark: The Living Grave; Screenplay: White Lady; and the Anglo-Irish production December Bride. All are available online in varying degrees of quality.) Despite being a prodigious screenwriter and playwright in the vein of contemporaries like Alan Garner and Anthony Schaffer, Rudkin never published a short story collection until last year at the young age of 89. The reaction has been muted since it was released limited edition through a small press. There's only one Goodreads review and no published professional reviews anywhere online. If you're a fan of Rudkin, you owe it to yourself to secure a copy and read this. The stories ascend in complexity as the volume progresses, and are about what you'd expect from the author of Penda's Fen, though I don't think any story quite mixes the personal, the sexual, the ethnographic, the fantastical, the historical, and the political as well as his most famous creation. But the title story with its shifting narrators and POVs and fonts comes pretty damn close. To the Arctic Cathedral was the most personally radiating of the collection for me, because it deals with a man who is contacted by his son who he had believed to be long dead. I've often had dreams where dead family members come back and I'm the only one who can see or hear them, so it hit me on an eerie level. The most surprising story is I Whistle and You Come to Me, My Man, which is totally unlike anything else Rudkin has done. It's a sexually explicit, even pornographic, tale of a middle aged gay man who has a sexual encounter with a teenage prostitute in Spain. It functions as a fulcrum brake in the collection, and is extremely visceral, owing far more to Cronenbergian body horror than Rudkin's usual M.R. James influences. I even questioned its inclusion here because it's so lurid and outré compared to any of the other stories, or really anything he's ever done before. But it's daring, and I think it saved the collection from being another typical British ghost story collection. ShoreZone is available now from Strange Attractor Press. I got my copy through Ziesings.