Toady
Edition: New Expanded edition
Publisher: Humdrumming
Published: September 18, 2006
Place of publication: Bournemouth, Dorset, England, UK
Format: Trade paper
Number of pages: 408
ISBN-13: 9781905532391
Subjects: Horror & ghost stories
First sentence: Thursday: The bell rang, and the school vomited screaming, laughing children into the playground.
Description: Welcome to the Horror Club:
a world of werewolves and poltergeists,
psychopaths and shape changers,
the un-quiet and the living dead.
A fantasy world, of course, for Richard, Robin and Nigel, the club’s members, are ordinary boys from ordinary families, who just happen to share a taste for the macabre in films and videos, books and comics. And then they admit a fourth member to their club — Toady, a far from ordinary boy with a taste for the macabre in real life. From the moment he lures the others into a nerve-jangling seance in a house with a chilling reputation, their lives are blighted by worse horror than they have ever imagined.
In a fusion of nightmare and reality, terror stalks the familiar streets of a sleepy seaside town and waits to invade the safest home. The pervasive stain of evil spreads like ripples on a pond, leaving a trail of sacrilege and death in its wake. One by one the members of the Horror Club are overcome and forced into a netherworld, halfway between illusion and reality. It is up to the final member to fight alone against the evil they have unleashed — until, in the final battle, he is joined by an unexpected ally…
Complete with a brand-new introduction by the author, Toady is a staggering achievement. BFS Award-nominated author Mark Morris takes all the established horror conventions and reworks them in a way that is completely fresh and inimitably his own, in this, his first novel.
Notes: This edition replaces ISBN 0-00649-040-9 (Voyager, Paperback, 1997), and was replaced by ISBN: 978-1-905532-41-4 (Humdrumming, Hardback, 2007). This novel also published in Paperback, edited for the USA reader by Spectra (re-titled "The Horror Club"), 1991: ISBN 0-55328-933-0