December

By Phil Rickman

A standalone supernatural thriller from the author of the chilling Merrily Watkins Mysteries.
December has the shortest days, the darkest nights... In the ruins of a medieval abbey on the Welsh Border, four young musicians start work on an album influenced by the site's bloody history. It's December 1980 - the night John Lennon will be murdered in New York. And there'll be more horror before the sun rises and the session tapes are burned. Or are they?
Years later, Moira, Dave, Tom and Simon are persuaded to return to the abbey to complete the recordings they thought had been destroyed. But the old tapes - and all the darkness they contain - have been restored. And it's December again.
A PHIL RICKMAN STANDALONE NOVEL

• Language: English
• Publisher: Corvus
• Release date: Oct 29, 2011
• ISBN: 9780857896902

Phil Rickman

PHIL RICKMAN lives on the Welsh border where he writes and presents the book programme Phil the Shelf on BBC Radio Wales. He is the hugely popular author of The Bones of Avalon, The Heresy of Dr Dee and the Merrily Watkins Mysteries.

Reviews for December

[riverwillow · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

The book opens in December 1980, a group of musicians, most of who are psychic as well as talented musicians, recording under the name ‘The Philosopher’s Stone’ are working overnight in a recording studio sited in an old abbey in rural Wales. The recording doesn’t go well and ends in tragedy, simultaneously, across the Atlantic, John Lennon is murdered. The story is then picked up 14 years later and explores how the events on both sides of the Atlantic have affected the various band members as they slowly come under pressure to reform and complete the unfinished sessions.This isn’t traditional horror, as always with Rickman’s writing the atmosphere is evoked in the spaces that he leaves in the narrative with the atmospheric abbey always situated at the heart of the story, Rickman roots this book in a landscape familiar to anyone who’s read any of his other books, for fans of the Merrily Watkins series – there’s even a fleeting reference to Ted Watkins – and the book does go some way to explaining some of the backstory to some events in that series.I really don’t understand why Rickman isn’t a bigger name in British fiction writing.

[ehines_20 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Rickman's interest in the blossoming of English folk-rock in the late sixties & early seventies to the fore in this one. Weirdly wired into the John Lennon killing, but it all hangs together in the end. Maybe the central book of his oeuvre.

[pollymoore3 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Moira Cairns the folk singer appears again (she was in The Man in the Moss). Another brilliantly evoked atmosphere, this time in an old abbey haunted by a psychic recording session, and by tragic events in Welsh history. Somehow the spirit of John Lennon is involved as well..........