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In the Shadow of the Phosphorous Dawn
Carl, reeling from the death of his brother, is drowning in visions. Followed by shadow men through the crumbling outer regions of the city. Unable to trust those closest to him. Doubting his own reality. As a wave of brutal, ritualistic gangland killings sweeps through the underworld, Carl's involvement with a life he thought he had left behind catches up with him, with terrifying results. In the Shadow of the Phosphorus Dawn is the raw, brilliant debut novel from Rob True, operating at the bleeding edge of crime and psychedelic horror.
180 pages, Paperback
First published May 27, 2021
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Displaying 1 - 19 of 19 reviews
December 20, 2022
Abandonment leaks grey dereliction. Crumbling edifices are haunted by missing entrails. The Hunter devours another beating heart and is haloed by ecstacy. Bleary and beaten, the spartan still rises with the sun. Life goes on.
June 6, 2021
Rob True’s debut novel is a short, powerful exercise in not so much blending the crime and horror genres as locking them in a condemned industrial unit and encouraging them to kick the crap out of each other. The story centres on Carl, a hard-luck case under the illusion that he’s escaped his gangland past, still mourning his brother’s suicide when a spate of ritualistic underworld murders find him dragged back into the orbit of Mick, head of one of the more powerful firms.
From the first page there is nothing more certain than that Carl is the very definition of an unreliable narrator. But that isn’t quite right, nor is it the whole story: it’s more complicated than that. How Carl got to where he is now is only implied—his crumbling psyche, his heroin use, his escalating urges towards chaotic violence—but we experience his stubborn, wearying existence with him on the page, propelled from one waking nightmare to the next by demons within and without. Stranded at the crossroads between psychosis and the supernatural, nothing he says can really be trusted, but everything he experiences seems horribly, crushingly real. And it’s not just him: nobody is ever entirely what they seem, and every character has their secrets and lies.
Demons and angels—often indistinguishable—float in orbit around Carl: the insatiable, shape-shifting, heart-devouring Hunter, seemingly unstoppable and untraceable in its mission to exterminate as many criminals as possible, and Anna, manager of Mick’s bars and strip clubs, Carl’s on-off lover and protector. Each walks and leaves their mark in the real world, but appear just as often in Carl’s hallucinations and fever dreams, hounding and tantalising him, never giving him a moment’s peace. There are elements of folk horror stalking the urban grime, with hordes of faceless celebrants applauding the sexually charged worship of the Hunter’s crusade.
No less brutal is the conceit of a man going through a protracted psychotic breakdown being forced to listen in on the conversations of as many gang members as he can surreptitiously bug as a way to find out who is committing the murders. Carl’s hallucinations are predominantly visual, but True has heaped a parallel sensory stressor on him here: pressganged back into Mick’s employ he must try to filter usefully incriminating information out of seemingly endless babble that’s ultimately about nothing at all.
There was a point, relatively early on, where I wondered whether the author would be able to maintain the pace of the narrator’s spiralling mental disintegration, but it’s well managed throughout. The madness ebbs and flows with Carl’s various methods of self-medication, and there are brief moments of respite, though the reader is never free of the sense that these are anything but fleeting, fragile and doomed. The possibility of multiple versions of Carl is suggested more than once and it’s tempting to wonder if Carl actually does escape his grim reality at some point along the journey, but then who or what is left to live out the script that’s been written for him by such a cruel god?
And there is an escape of sorts, Carl on the run with a new lover who’s been on a collision course with him since page one. But it’s a flight into further dissolution and decay, to the shabby yesteryear of English seaside towns ruined further by Carl’s burgeoning paranoia. When the end comes, it comes in a rush, as it was always going to. Sanity can only be stretched so far, and the list of sacrificial victims is inevitably finite. Every narrative knot unravels and the reader is left questioning ghosts as to what was hallucination and what premonition; what was nightmare and what was a wish fulfilled.
In the Shadow of the Phosphorus Dawn is an assured debut, the prose for the most part staccato—barked out by a black dog, urgent and out of time—and yet there are enough occasional flourishes to keep the hammering of words from being unbearable. It’s also unflinching and relentless in its portrayal of mental illness—Carl is a violent man, but the book never stereotypes him as violent solely as a result of his psychosis—he exists in a world of men as vicious as himself yet free from the stigma he bears, and suffers as much physical harm and pain as he deals out.
Another strong voice from Influx Press, and another new name to watch.
(A longer version of this review should be appearing elsewhere online shortly.)
From the first page there is nothing more certain than that Carl is the very definition of an unreliable narrator. But that isn’t quite right, nor is it the whole story: it’s more complicated than that. How Carl got to where he is now is only implied—his crumbling psyche, his heroin use, his escalating urges towards chaotic violence—but we experience his stubborn, wearying existence with him on the page, propelled from one waking nightmare to the next by demons within and without. Stranded at the crossroads between psychosis and the supernatural, nothing he says can really be trusted, but everything he experiences seems horribly, crushingly real. And it’s not just him: nobody is ever entirely what they seem, and every character has their secrets and lies.
Demons and angels—often indistinguishable—float in orbit around Carl: the insatiable, shape-shifting, heart-devouring Hunter, seemingly unstoppable and untraceable in its mission to exterminate as many criminals as possible, and Anna, manager of Mick’s bars and strip clubs, Carl’s on-off lover and protector. Each walks and leaves their mark in the real world, but appear just as often in Carl’s hallucinations and fever dreams, hounding and tantalising him, never giving him a moment’s peace. There are elements of folk horror stalking the urban grime, with hordes of faceless celebrants applauding the sexually charged worship of the Hunter’s crusade.
No less brutal is the conceit of a man going through a protracted psychotic breakdown being forced to listen in on the conversations of as many gang members as he can surreptitiously bug as a way to find out who is committing the murders. Carl’s hallucinations are predominantly visual, but True has heaped a parallel sensory stressor on him here: pressganged back into Mick’s employ he must try to filter usefully incriminating information out of seemingly endless babble that’s ultimately about nothing at all.
There was a point, relatively early on, where I wondered whether the author would be able to maintain the pace of the narrator’s spiralling mental disintegration, but it’s well managed throughout. The madness ebbs and flows with Carl’s various methods of self-medication, and there are brief moments of respite, though the reader is never free of the sense that these are anything but fleeting, fragile and doomed. The possibility of multiple versions of Carl is suggested more than once and it’s tempting to wonder if Carl actually does escape his grim reality at some point along the journey, but then who or what is left to live out the script that’s been written for him by such a cruel god?
And there is an escape of sorts, Carl on the run with a new lover who’s been on a collision course with him since page one. But it’s a flight into further dissolution and decay, to the shabby yesteryear of English seaside towns ruined further by Carl’s burgeoning paranoia. When the end comes, it comes in a rush, as it was always going to. Sanity can only be stretched so far, and the list of sacrificial victims is inevitably finite. Every narrative knot unravels and the reader is left questioning ghosts as to what was hallucination and what premonition; what was nightmare and what was a wish fulfilled.
In the Shadow of the Phosphorus Dawn is an assured debut, the prose for the most part staccato—barked out by a black dog, urgent and out of time—and yet there are enough occasional flourishes to keep the hammering of words from being unbearable. It’s also unflinching and relentless in its portrayal of mental illness—Carl is a violent man, but the book never stereotypes him as violent solely as a result of his psychosis—he exists in a world of men as vicious as himself yet free from the stigma he bears, and suffers as much physical harm and pain as he deals out.
Another strong voice from Influx Press, and another new name to watch.
(A longer version of this review should be appearing elsewhere online shortly.)
June 28, 2021
Influx Press is currently in a league of their own for releasing challenging and unclassifiable fiction, with Rob True’s bleakest of debuts In the Shadow of the Phosphorous Dawn ramping that reputation up to eleven. In the acknowledgments the author thanks Gary Budden, editor at Influx Press, who is not averse himself to penning head-scratching fiction, and there are certainly similarities to his own fragmented non-linear style. I’ve read a fair bit of Budden, and I am sure he would have been proud to have written this hallucinogenic bad trip himself.
You can read Tony's full review at Horror DNA by clicking here.
You can read Tony's full review at Horror DNA by clicking here.
June 21, 2023
Wow! Just Wow! Lost for words here, the book really gives your emotions a proper good thrashing. Carl is already fragile when this story starts, overwhelmed with grief over his brother’s suicide he comes into contact with characters from his past and the addictions that come with that baggage. As we delve deeper into the book reality becomes more twisted, and you are constantly trying to figure out what or who is real, there is a constant darkness threatening to overwhelm Carl. Carl is almost one of those “unreliable narrators” that doesn’t tell events accurately but that ain’t quite right, he has as much awareness of what is true as we do and you can’t help but care for him, egging him on telling he is going to beat this. Whilst Carl’s life is falling apart gangsters and drug dealers are being wiped out by a serial killer, ultra violent deaths, the killer is faceless and could be anybody, the nightmarish visions that Carl is having during his spiral makes everyone a suspect.
As well as the slow deterioration of Carl’s mind there is also the breakdown of society; drugs, fighting, murder, and even the sex has violence blended in to it. The landscape too, descriptions of the city, the buildings and the rooms that Carl sees all feel on the edge of crumbling away, the despair in the writing has washed away all colour from this book, it’s like playing a video game with the brightness turned down low, you can see shadows and make out where you are going but any second something is going to jump out and you’ll lose your way for a moment.
This is one of the best debuts I have stumbled across, slick poetic writing of the highest order. The book is writhe with paranoia and I loved it, the handling of mental health conditions comes across as authentic and is written from the heart. This is the front runner for my book of 2023.
Blog review: https://felcherman.wordpress.com/2023...
As well as the slow deterioration of Carl’s mind there is also the breakdown of society; drugs, fighting, murder, and even the sex has violence blended in to it. The landscape too, descriptions of the city, the buildings and the rooms that Carl sees all feel on the edge of crumbling away, the despair in the writing has washed away all colour from this book, it’s like playing a video game with the brightness turned down low, you can see shadows and make out where you are going but any second something is going to jump out and you’ll lose your way for a moment.
This is one of the best debuts I have stumbled across, slick poetic writing of the highest order. The book is writhe with paranoia and I loved it, the handling of mental health conditions comes across as authentic and is written from the heart. This is the front runner for my book of 2023.
Blog review: https://felcherman.wordpress.com/2023...
January 15, 2026
A bleak tale of blight and misery that collapses in on itself, morphing from crime noir to the horror of a sick, haunted, and violent man trapped in his own psyche. The prose is beautiful, recalling the desolate urban landscapes of fellow Influx Press author Joel Lane.
Surprisingly, True, according to his About the Author, was actually borderline illiterate until his wife taught him writing at age 40, making this book quite an impressive achievement.
Surprisingly, True, according to his About the Author, was actually borderline illiterate until his wife taught him writing at age 40, making this book quite an impressive achievement.
June 4, 2023
A good debut. Feels like it would make a really good art film, like a mix of 'Snatch' and 'Possum'. The dialects are really well rendered and some of the dream sequences are compelling.
Read
November 4, 2022Man this was grim
July 4, 2023
In this book, words are used in a discordant manner and I think that this is the underlying factor that renders the world so vivid in your mind whilst also being so distant that it appears as a grainy film of the inside of someone else's mind. True manages to create a unique atmosphere that runs through the work and without it, wouldn't be successful in portraying the paranoid, hallucinatory and crime riddled underworld. He manages to write a third person narrative in a first person voice, it is the protagonist Carl, telling us about Carl, and this only adds to the separation of self throughout the book. A unique vision and an artistic rendering of a schizophrenic mind in a world so hostile to these sensibilities. 'Brutal' has been used a lot to describe Phosphorous Dawn and although there are graphic elements in there, they only add to portrayal of the world within its pages and as strong as Carl can seem on the surface, his underlying vulnerabilities are never too far away from the surface. The pages of this book glide from one to the other creating a lasting impact and a voice that lingers in your head. Very highly recommended.
October 16, 2021
It was good. Dreary. Yes it was violent but not gratuitous. It fit the story. There was a slight horror aspect to it but I wouldn't classify it as horror. It seemed to me to be more about an addict's relationship to the world around him, which wasn't expansive. I will say some to the delusioned descriptions were written with accuracy. A lot of it relatable.
I suppose it could be described as psychedelic if you're unfamiliar with narcotics. Everything bleak, looming in the corners. Peripheral mayhem. Questioning everything that happens. Was it real? The fear of the outside or disdain for people. Nothing is important, everything, including oneself is useless. A wanting to slip under the black water that seems never to be deep enough. It takes a certain strength to live like that. And to some, this is a reality.
It was a unique and entertaining story. I enjoyed it. And easy read to rip through in an afternoon. I know now at some point it will be one of the books I read again.
I suppose it could be described as psychedelic if you're unfamiliar with narcotics. Everything bleak, looming in the corners. Peripheral mayhem. Questioning everything that happens. Was it real? The fear of the outside or disdain for people. Nothing is important, everything, including oneself is useless. A wanting to slip under the black water that seems never to be deep enough. It takes a certain strength to live like that. And to some, this is a reality.
It was a unique and entertaining story. I enjoyed it. And easy read to rip through in an afternoon. I know now at some point it will be one of the books I read again.
September 16, 2021
Well looky what we have here. A veritable matryoshka of a novelette. A horror story within a Noir all wrapped up in an unreliable narrator - but a narrator who is, incidentally, the only believable thing in the whole construct: he might not have the strongest grasp of what is real or what isn't, but we can trust him when he says what he sees. It's a grotesque rollercoaster of a tale that leaves you breathless.
August 18, 2021
This book hit me like a shovel. It's unlike anything else, anywhere. It's an unapologetically challenging book, one which, if you put the effort in, will reward you in spades. The writing is so unique and bloody marvelous. An absolute stonker of a book!
June 14, 2021
Incredible writing, reminiscent of William Burroughs - psychedelic is the wrong word, it's hallucinatory - but urgently contemporary, scummy and violent.
August 10, 2021
Picked this up in a blind date with a book promising ‘crime and psychedelic horror… amongst a spate of brutal ritualistic killings’.
Crime happens, killings happen, does any plot or resolution happen? No.
Content warnings for rape and sexual assault written terribly.
Crime happens, killings happen, does any plot or resolution happen? No.
Content warnings for rape and sexual assault written terribly.
June 26, 2021
Loved this violent, hallucinatory trip of a book.
September 16, 2021
Brilliant monster of a book, full of monstrous monsters
December 16, 2021
No idea what was going on people just kept being murdered - enjoyed the writing though and good depiction of addiction
April 10, 2024
Bleak. Fuck.
Read
September 11, 2024I found this a difficult read. Eventually missed reading some of it as I found it too disturbing. But it is a different kind of writing and clever but just not for me.
March 19, 2024
Urban noir complete with interior monologue. The protagonist - a junky - starts to lose his grip on reality and his life spirals out of control. Rob True conjures up a sort of William Burroughs-esque atmosphere, but the story doesn't really go anywhere and is rather repetitious.
Influx Press have also been reissuing Joel Lane, so this work is very much in the same vein, though Rob True is not in the same league as that master of noir and the liminal.
Well worth reading, though. 3.5 stars out of 5, hence 4/5.
Influx Press have also been reissuing Joel Lane, so this work is very much in the same vein, though Rob True is not in the same league as that master of noir and the liminal.
Well worth reading, though. 3.5 stars out of 5, hence 4/5.
Displaying 1 - 19 of 19 reviews