Most grandparents leave you money after you die. But Scott’s grandfather leaves him to a map to a book of otherworldly evil, in Tim Lebbon’s THE EVERLASTING.

Thirty years after Papa killed his best friend Lewis and then himself, Scott receives a letter from Papa containing strange symbols. Then the ghost of Lewis appears and hauls Scott’s wife off to another dimension. Then a woman named Nina shows up, claiming to be an immortal, and tells Scott that they’ve got to find the lost pages to the Chord of Souls in order to get his wife back.

Nina serves as his guide on this long, strange trip – one that takes them to rotted cellars, caves, castles and eventually to the awesomely named House of Screaming Skulls. Their journey is peppered with such strange characters as Old Man – who is naked and crawls like a spider, thanks to barbed hooks at the ends of his limbs – and Tigre, another immortal, also naked, whose body is comprised of scars.

Lebbon’s tales of terror long have come with a heavy, heady dose of fantasy, and EVERLASTING even moreso. If it seems as if the rules of the immortal world – “the Wide” – are being made up as Lebbon goes along, at least it serves to make the work less predictable. After all, would you ever expect your hero to dine on Big Macs with two immortals?

I like novels that send various characters to various locations in search of various objects, so Lebbon naturally won me over from the start. It does get too cyclical – at one point running in circles rather than moving forward – but the ride is laden with ghosts and gore. For current British horror, few produce it as well as Lebbon. –Rod Lott

Buy it at Amazon.

OTHER BOOKGASM REVIEWS OF THIS AUTHOR:
• BERSERK by Tim Lebbon