The Standing Water

Updated cover edition of [ASIN B019UH7ACY](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/29088050-the-standing-water)

A work of quality literary fiction with a gothic edge, 'The Standing Water' is a strangely disturbing take on the small town, coming of age story. Growing up in remote Emberfield, Ryan suspects his headmaster may be responsible for the deaths of two pupils. Could he be? In Ryan's strange, hallucinatory world - a place where dead boys might haunt ponds, where the landscape is said to be littered with ghosts and curses - the borders between the imaginary and real, light and darkness, life and death can seem blurred. But for how long will Ryan's rich inner life shield him against the volatile and brutal Mr Weirton and the harsh adult world of his hometown?

A gripping tale that unwinds in darkly poetic prose, 'The Standing Water' uncovers violence, cruelty and sinister secrets in the rain-sodden flatlands of 1980s northern England.

A literary fiction novel - with borrowings from the genres of magical realism, gothic literature and suspense - 'The Standing Water' (Steel String Books) has been compared to a post-modern mix of Dickens, Twain and Poe. The novel could also be placed in the fabulist tradition of writers like Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Gunter Grass, Ben Okri and Jorge Luis Borges.

Enter a world in which TV sets, cartoons and cars coexist alongside skeletons, knightly tombs, glimpses of angels, tales of ghostly drummer boys, and legends of mysterious forces that can switch from malevolent to helpful then back again. Enter a world in which little is as it appears, where Old Testament myths have a habit of playing themselves out under heavy English skies, and where death stalks even the young and innocent.