Joint Winner of 2010 Independent Publisher Book Award Horror category.
In the brilliant red doom of a Hampshire sunset, Brigit Conti can hear a voice behind her ears that is not her own. Bed-bound and complaining of a rare bone disease that no doctor can diagnose, her husband fears that the house they have purchased is a portal through which an older, more malign energy has passed, possessing his wife and son. Through their successive deterioration, his secular and agnostic world-view undergoes a metamorphosis, drawing him to a strange man from the hills: the Rector, their unlikely saviour.
Or are he and his family merely victims of their own self-serving yuppie way of life?
The Picture of Contented New Wealth is a gothic tragedy set in the 1980s, bringing proper characterization and a literary sensibility to the traditional horror story. Its mix of generic elements and mystical realism deal with the irreducibility of evil and its successful normalization in to our daily and dominant reality.
