The Stone Tide: Adventures at the End of the World

by Gareth E. Rees

'The problems started the day we moved to Hastings...'

When Gareth E. Rees moves to a dilapidated Victorian house in Hastings he begins to piece together an occult puzzle connecting Aleister Crowley, John Logie Baird and the Piltdown Man hoaxer. As freak storms and tidal surges ravage the coast, Rees is beset by memories of his best friend's tragic death in St Andrews twenty years earlier. Convinced that apocalypse approaches and his past is out to get him, Rees embarks on a journey away from his family, deep into history and to the very edge of the imagination. Tormented by possessed seagulls, mutant eels and unresolved guilt, how much of reality can he trust?

The Stone Tide is a novel about grief, loss, history and the imagination. It is about how people make the place and the place makes the person. Above all it is about the stories we tell to make sense of the world.

Genres: Fiction, British Literature

336 pages, Hardcover

First published March 8, 2018

About the author

Gareth E. Rees is a writer of fiction and non fiction. His books include Sunken Lands (Elliott & Thompson 2024), Terminal Zones (Influx Press 2022), Unofficial Britain (Elliott & Thompson, 2020), Car Park Life (Influx Press 2019), The Stone Tide (Influx Press, 2018). His first book 'Marshland' was reissued in 2024 by Influx Press in a new expanded edition.

‘What he seeks out is the magical in the mundane, the bizarre happenings in plain sight’
- Deborah Moggach, The Times

Reviews

[Neil · Rating 3 out of 5]

Recently, I read Under The Rock: The Poetry of a Place by Benjamin Myers. In that book, the author moves out of London into an old property and begins to explore his new location by taking long walks with his dog. So, I was, perhaps understandably, slightly confused when I started this book in which the author moves out of London into an old property and begins to explore his new location by taking long walks with his dog.

Fortunately, that is where the similarities end. Myers' work is a poetic meditation on place. Rees' work is a far stranger mixture of fact, speculation and fiction.

In 1297, King Edward I's horse was startled by a windmill at Winchelsea and leapt over the edge of a cliff. It fell 30 feet, hit a sloping bank, slid and came to a halt with the king still on its back. So much is recorded fact. What is perhaps less well known is the metaphysical encounter the king had during his descent with Rod Hull and emu.

You and I might think this encounter is unlikely to have actually happened. But how do we know that?

"To truly remember an experience, don’t you need imagination? What other tool do you have for going back in time? How factual can any memory be once excavated and reassembled? A truth told is only a version of itself."

George Bristow shot, stuffed and sold a huge number of birds between 1892 and 1930. According to Bristow and the hunters he bribed to back him up, they were all shot within a 20 mile radius of Hastings (where The Stone Tide is set) and they made him an ornithological legend. Except, of course, he wasn’t. But now, almost 90 years later, climate change means that nearly all of Bristow’s fakes have now been seen in Britain (I went to see a Glossy Ibis last year, for example). As Rees says in the book, "He faked something that later turned out to be true."

This questioning of truth and of reality is a constant theme through The Stone Tide, often in bizarre ways like the ones I have quoted, often in slightly more philosophical ways. We read the story of Rees's move to Hastings, his attempts (well, his wife's attempts) to renovate the house they buy, his struggle to write a book, the gradual disintegration of his marriage. He has an ongoing struggle with the guilt he feels over the death of his closest friend.

Mixed in with that, we read about John Logie Baird, Aleister Crowley and several other historical figures who ended their days in or near Hastings or historical events that happened in the area. Rees becomes convinced that Hastings is a place with a very spiritual dimension (the English channel, TV channels, spiritualist channels all converge?) which is why people like Crowley ended up there (or perhaps because people like Crowley ended up there). He wants to write a book:

"If this town was a nexus of hotlines to the past, why not find out how the lines connected with each other? Why not seek out the ghosts at the other end?"

This becomes his obsession and drives several of the hallucinatory scenes in the book which gradually take more and more prominence, as well as driving his wife away.

It’s a very entertaining read. Goodreads says it is 372 pages long. I read the Kindle version without page numbers, but it didn’t feel anything like that long.

[Jackie Law · Rating 5 out of 5]

“I’d come to realise that none of this was ours. Not really. A house is an accumulation of lives. It permits you to dwell among its walls for as long as those walls stand. But you will never own it. Instead the house owns you. It takes your money and makes you work hard to protect it until you either leave or die. Then it waits for the next soul to come along.”

The Stone Tide, by Gareth E. Rees, explores how moments in a person’s life affect self and those who come after, the unconsidered consequences of both action and inaction. It tells of grief and loss, searches for meaning in memory, how the stories we tell ourselves at any given time, that we consider fact, shape what comes next.

Gareth moves with his wife, Emily, and their two young daughters from Hackney in London to a dilapidated Victorian house in Hastings. When he walks his dog down to the seashore Gareth is assailed by memories of his best friend from school, Mike, who died falling from the castle walls in St Andrews twenty years ago. While Emily is devoting her time and talents to renovating their home, Gareth researches the history of their new environment, intending to write a book on the people and place.

Hastings has a rich history, and not just of an eleventh century battle. In 1923 John Logie Baird, who moved to the town for the good of his health, built a prototype of a machine that would transform the way people viewed the world. Television wasn’t a new idea, and Baird’s work was superseded by the Marconi Corporation, but the restorative walks he took around Hastings inspired him. Or so says the author. In each of the people he studies he writes elements of their story as he imagines it to have been.

He includes Teilhard de Chardin, a Jesuit priest and fossil hunter who wrote a book called The Phenomenon of Man that was subsequently banned by the Catholic Church. The tome predicted the World Wide Web. Charles Dawson was another local fossil hunter. He desired fame and was not averse to manufacturing archaeological finds to achieve it. His most famous creation, Piltdown Man, was inspired by a conversation with Sir Arthur Conan Doyle who also, for a time, resided in Hastings.

Aleister Crowley was another infamous resident. His belief in the occult and his own powers are demonstrated during a meeting with Baird on the seafront. All of these people worked in and around places that Gareth visits, examining what remains of their history and legends. He explores the lives and the deaths, reflecting on: memorials in churchyards; blue plaques on buildings; names or initials carved in teenage hangouts; a proliferation of memorial benches.

Emily is deep in her own research, seeking out the best materials and tradespeople as she organises the tearing up of the house and assists in its rebuild. Gareth admits he is of little help, escaping whenever he feels overwhelmed by the state of their home. As well as the challenges of progressing his writing he is plagued by health issues. In a pub he empathises with a collection of stuffed cats who died of suspected smoke inhalation.

“Life was hard. The best you could hope for was a little warmth now and then, even if the attempt killed you.”

Time passes and Gareth is possessed by the landscape and its development as he catches glimpses of other’s lives in shifting time and space. He contemplates the barrier between perceived reality and fantasy. He ponders if such a thing exists, if life is the stories we create for ourselves.

Gareth’s story is shadowed by memories of his friend, Mike, and his lack of progress with his book. He compiles a wealth of research but it lacks the coherent structure he initially envisaged. Meanwhile progress on the renovation has stalled due to lack of funds. Emily’s frustrations finally pierce Gareth’s self-absorption. Just as Mike’s actions affected Gareth, and forever changed his parents – a reality that Gareth could not see at the time – so Gareth’s actions have affected Emily.

The writing is a fascinating smorgasbord of interlinked history and memory. There are many references to factual accounts but I preferred not to dig further into the references provided at the end. The truth or fiction of what is being explored is both irrelevant and a key point in the narrative. It is a story, as is everything anyone learns or experiences. We are shaped by the time and place in which we live, just as we are a factor in shaping it. Each individual’s accepted truth is unique.

An unusual, deeply personal account that offers up many wider issues to consider alongside a psychogeography of Hastings. Beguiling yet brutal in its honesty, this is a recommended read.

My copy of this book was provided gratis by the publisher, Influx Press.

[Sophy H · Rating 3 out of 5]

Erm, well, this was a curious collection of words I must say!

This was like reading someone's slow and protracted nervous breakdown.

Rees does a great job of investigating Aleister Crowley and all things coastal in Hastings, as he does in his list of things that go wrong with his (do-er up-per) house! What he can't seem to see is how his marriage is going down the shitter and how he is completely absent from the relationship, leaving his wife to (literally) labour on without him and his two daughters to look at him askance every time he acts weird.

Stories and reminiscences of old are overlaid with the present so that past, present and future seem to become one huge amalgam of events, lores and happenings, one humungous palimpsest. It's a little confusing to say the least. Rees also documents a seemingly serious health issue but we never find out what is going on with him. There are many one way streets in this writing, where you feel pulled along in Rees's madness never to reach an actual lucid destination.

All that I know for sure is that he lost his best mate to a tragic accident when they were young and he's been feeling guilty ever since.

A very random read that I can loosely say I enjoyed, however not one I'm likely to re-read in the future.

[Ashley Stokes · Rating 5 out of 5]

Superficially this is a book about trying to write a book that wants to be an occult history of Hastings but by turns becomes a raw account of living and loss, ambitions and failures, illness and limits. No genre goes unspliced in the telling, yet all the strands meet at the heart of a web of, at first, unfocussed ideas and contingent obsessions. I found this a brave, inventive and profoundly moving book, new English landscape writing at its most expansive and necessary. Gareth E Rees is a post-punk Sebald, like Will Ashon, like Gary Budden, and well worth watching out for.

[Rob Adey · Rating 4 out of 5]

An unusual but very readable novel/memoir, in a John Higgs kind of territory. I'm not totally sure the strands gelled together completely, but very enjoyable regardless. I kind of want to go to Hastings now and it's nice to think the book could be a very oblique strategy by some shadowy Visit Hastings operation.

[Tommi · Rating 3 out of 5]

In his second novel, The Stone Tide: Adventures at the End of the World, Gareth E. Rees’s narrator moves with his wife and children to an old, crumbling house in Hastings by the sea. As the renovation demands more work than they initially had thought, the dream of a lovely new home begins to fall apart, as does their marriage. The narrator averts from marital problems by feeding his insatiable appetite for local history and previous residents, such as the occultist Aleister Crowley and John Logie Baird, the early inventor of what would later be known as the television. In a truly psychogeographic fashion, the narrator roams Hastings and, by doing so, shows wonderfully the influence that places can have on the human psyche. He imagines scenarios and creates narratives with the long-dead residents of the city, blurring the line between reality and imagination. Moreover, he is haunted by the death of a friend, still prevailing in his mind after decades. (Deceased male friends and brothers seems to be a popular subject in novels at the moment; see e.g. The Tree of the Toraja, Older Brother, The Language of Birds.) The Stone Tide is written with lively prose, accompanied by photos, and undulates between comedy (with some great one-liners like “there was something deeply sinister about a duck quacking at night”) and tragedy. Being a novel largely about a place, Rees conjures Hastings vividly, although parts of it might be more appreciated by someone with first-hand experience of the city. And, while it might not leave the longest of aftertastes, The Stone Tide is absorbingly readable. As humanists in academia are increasingly interested in spatiality, Gareth E. Rees shows concretely what the spaces and places we roam can do to us as human beings.

Written for the Helsinki Book Review.

[Tracy Birrell · Rating 4 out of 5]

Having lived in Hastings for all of my 67 years this book interested me greatly. I recognised nearly everywhere mentioned.My only disappointment was the ending,I wanted to know what happened to Gareth, as I had become fond of him.

[Keen Reader · Rating 3 out of 5]

So this is the third book of Rees I’ve read over the last few months, one was great and the other terrible, so I was going into this with mixed feelings. Like in his other work he reminisces about his best friend who died in his early twenties back in St Andrews in 1996. There is a lot more emphasis on it in here and it is clearly a tragedy which still looms large decades later within his psychological landscape.

Charles Dawson, Aleister Crowley and John Logie Baird are three of the names which seem to cast a dark shadow over this book, but there is a rambling roll call of residents past and present, many of them with fascinating back stories and dark secrets which Rees builds into his own story making for a peculiar yet intriguing odyssey of sorts. There is a lot of confessional memoir in here, much of it dark and wistful.

Overall this a lot more restrained and focused than “Marshland” which was all over the place. There’s some really nice use of language, vibrant purple patches which pull you into some intriguing head spaces and places. There are some dead ends but ultimately Rees seems to have struck a nice balance between memoir, myth and the mystical.

[Christina Dongowski · Rating 3 out of 5]

It took me some time to get through this memoir cum psychogeography of Hastings and its coastline , not only because the parts about grieving (more like trying to avoid grieving) for Mike are often very moving and painfully to read, but because the avoiding is baked into the structure of the book. It’s permanently loosing the plot (intentionally, I think), but it sometimes lost me along the way, especially when it’s gotten to deep into British male psychogeography kitsch. I think it would have been a better book, if some of this was cut out, like some of the Crowley bits, but all in all I liked it and would recommend it to anyone interested in place and / or nature writing, the ordinariness of occult experiences and hauntings, and in psychogeography.

[Dead John Williams · Rating 5 out of 5]

The last of the three books of his that I read. To me they form a trilogy but I may be missing something like discernment and good taste.

Set down in Hastings / St Leonards, it chronicles the renovation of an old house, the demolition of his marriage, the tussle between Alister Crowley and John Logie Baird and much, much more.

By the time I got most of the way through this book I’d really had enough of Gareth E Rees and his woes but I did have some sympathy for woes nonetheless.

I still admired his vulnerability and his tenacity in getting all this down. He doesn’t come across an an author so much as the kind of bloke you wouldn’t want to get stuck next to at a party whilst also being someone you look forward to catching up with because their life seems interesting if not chaotic. I think I’d like him.

Would I recommend this or any of his books to anyone else? I think I would if you are kinda out there somewhere or recognise that “drawn to the edge of things” in yourself. Not to everyone’s taste but I found them engaging.

[Giles · Rating 3 out of 5]

I desperately wanted to love this, but in a sense the subject matter is the author’s own self-involvement and acknowledging that isn’t quite enough to transcend it. Entertaining but ultimately unsatisfying.

[Richard Hakes · Rating 3 out of 5]

I read the book on a recommendation, it started OK but just went nowhere.

[Alex Sarll]

A novel posing as a memoir, or possibly vice versa, in which hapless London writer Gareth E. Rees moves to Hastings and finds that houses described as 'a project' can test the romance out of any relationship, especially when combined with parenthood or, as he puts it, playing unpaid hotelier to egomaniacal midgets. While his more practical partner tries her best to deal with the time and money pit of their possibly cursed home, he ponders whether our houses are ever really ours, or if we're simply parasites on their surface. I can't imagine why she loses patience with him, can you? He insists he's working on a book about the area's secret history, but all he's got is an unmanageable mess of theories about Piltdown hoaxer Charles Dawson, theologian Teilhard de Chardin, the occult war between Aleister Crowley and John Logie Baird, and how Rod Hull died for Edward I's sins (a mess which, of course, merges with (faux? embellished?) autobiography to become this book). He's haunted by memories of a friend who never lived to get old and boring, he's trying to hang on to a few last tatters of youth and cool – oh, and his balls are killing him. Like any good parody, it has to skirt pretty close to that which it parodies, so depending how exasperating you find psychogeography wankers, it might do terrible things to your blood pressure, but when I wasn't feeling thoroughly attacked, and even sometimes when I was, I found it thoroughly entertaining.

[Aiden · Rating 3 out of 5]

Gareth E. Rees moves to a Victorian house in Hastings which leads to him piecing together a puzzle connecting Alister Crowley, John Logie Baird and the Piltdown Man hoaxer. Storms ravage the coast and Rees is troubled with memories of his best friends death. Rees is convinced life is out to get him as we embark on a journey of history and imagination, mutant eels, grief, loss and guilt. Ress has written a mixture of fact and speculation set in the costal town of Hastings we come across historical figures whos lifes ended near or in Hastings as Rees is convinced there's a spiritual connection. His obsession leads to the breakdown of his marriage.

An entertaining read that I probably wouldn't have picked up but I found it very readable and insightful considering I never read memoirs but I think this is down to the interesting history of Hastings and the humour Rees cleverly filtered through the text.

[miss s white · Rating 5 out of 5]

Sublime

Captures the enigmatic soul, darkness and mythology of the eclectic wonder that is Hastings with fiction and historical depth. And brings me back home with the beauty of the ever changing mood of the East Sussex Coastline.

[Ivy Pavlova · Rating 4 out of 5]

Wonderful stuff. And definitely not just for Hastings nerds.

[Judith · Rating 3 out of 5]

Strange but compelling read. 3 and-a-half stars.

[Carl Schalck · Rating 4 out of 5]

Quite a trip of a book, with extra interest for those familiar with Hastings and the East Sussex coast.

[Gael Impiazzi · Rating 4 out of 5]

Rather grim, really, although it did make me laugh a few times. But it was an interesting (and bizarre) read.

[Dean Muscat · Rating 5 out of 5]

4.5

review coming soon

[Artur Nowrot]

I’m not sure if I liked this novel exactly, as it was at times difficult, challenging, and frustrating. (Mainly due to the “male protagonist learns that he was an asshole and should be more considerate” plot, which is less frustrating than “male protagonist is an asshole but is completely oblivious to it” but barely.) At the same time, parts of it were hitting uncomfortably close to home – I also have huge tendencies to live inside my own head with my obsessions, and my partner is very oriented towards home and allotment projects that require participation from both of us and the scene where the narrator’s wife confesses she doesn’t love him anymore is very affecting. I would have preferred if the narrator/protagonist had a chance to act on his epiphany to fix things with his wife, but I’m sappy like that and besides, this is an autobiographical novel and life doesn’t always give you happy endings.

At the same time, the book does a lot of things that I really enjoyed: the exploration of place, the mixing of fact and fiction, local and personal history. All of that really worked for me and I loved how it all tied together at the end. I’ll continue to look out for stuff that Rees creates in the future.