Welcome Stranger

Point Horror Unleashed

by Anthony Masters, Tim Edmonds (Editor)

The stranger strangler has been brutally murdering homeless girls near the run-down old cinema where Tom Burden works. The shelter next-door is a magnet for the young and vunerable, and the serial killer who's stalking them. Late at night in the cinema, Tom's plagued by unexplained noises-the old organ starts playing by itself, lights are mysteriously switched off. Worst of all there's the terrifying whispering and wheezing that haunts him in the darkness-the sound of someone struggling; of someone dying to breathe.

Genres: Horror, Young Adult

192 pages, Paperback

First published December 13, 2002

About the author

Anthony Masters was a writer, educator and humanitarian of exceptional gifts and prodigious energy. He was, in the parlance of his spiritual ancestors, the ancient mariners, that rare voyager "as gracious as a trade wind and as dependable as an anchor".

He leaves 11 works of adult fiction – notably, Conquering Heroes (1969), Red Ice (1986, with Nicholas Barker), The Men (1997), The Good and Faithful Servant (1999) and Lifers (2001) – and was in the process of completing another, Dark Bridges, which he thought would be his best. Many of these works carry deep insights into social problems that he gained, over four decades, by helping the socially excluded, be it by running soup kitchens for drug addicts or by campaigning for the civic rights of gypsies and other ethnic minorities.

His non-fiction output was typically eclectic. It ranged from the biographies of such diverse personalities as Hannah Senesh (The Summer that Bled, 1972), Mikhail Bakunin (Bakunin: the father of anarchism, 1974), Nancy Astor (Nancy Astor: a life, 1981) and the British secret service chief immortalised by Ian Fleming in his James Bond books (The Man Who Was M: the life of Maxwell Knight, 1984), to a history of the notorious asylum Bedlam (Bedlam, 1977).

Reviews

[Sarah Elizabeth · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was okay, but didn't hold my attention that well.

* Tom works at a cinema called 'The Roxy'. He left school without finishing his A-levels, his mother married a man who has an obnoxious daughter (Louise). His mother and step-father want to move away from London to a small cottage somewhere, and Tom doesn't want to go with them (partly because Louise drives him nuts).
* There's a centre for homeless people next-door to The Roxy called 'Welcome Stranger'. They want to buy The Roxy and turn it into a hostel for the homeless.
* Seb owns The Roxy. Perry works there as the projectionist, Nancy (Seb's daughter) also works there, and Tom works as a general dogsbody. They've been going to a cult audience recently and have been playing old horror movies.
* Someone has started murdering homeless girls (by strangulation). When a third girl is killed, she's left in The Roxy.
* The Roxy is hit by an order from the council to close due to problems with fire regulations, and must find money from somewhere to be able to re-open. Perry sells some footage that he had shot to the TV people in an effort to try and make money, but goes too far and is fired. Nancy also breaks up with him.
* Tom then goes into the Roxy, and comes across Perry in the auditorium, he confronts him as he saw a homeless girl earlier with bruises on her neck, and she claimed that Perry had made them. He then goes up to the projection room and finds Nancy dead with a ring of bruises round her throat. He assumes that Perry is to blame, but Perry points the finger at another man in the auditorium - Cliff - the social worker from Welcome Stranger. (I totally guessed it was him 😂 on page 30 I think 😂)