Break Of Dark - Tapa blanda

Is there a barrier that divides the dark unknown from the everyday world around us?

If so, is it broken sometimes by the dead returning, by the undead, or by alien creatures?

What else could account for the chance meeting (or was it?) between a young student and hitch-hiker who turns out to be so much stranger than she seems? Why else should three successive crews flying a Second World War bomber - Blackham's Wimpey - be driven to madness, despair, even to death, though the plane returns from each mission without a scratch? Who are Fred, Alice and Aunty Lou; the figments of Peter's imagination that become a real life nightmare for Roger and Biddy?

There is St Austin Friars, too: a church without a congregation - until a burial service, oddly arranged a month ahead, is attended by a sinister assortment of the living and the dead. And Sergeant Nice, an ordinary policeman in an ordinary seaside town faced with a series of quite extraordinary thefts; the work surely, of no human hand.

Chilling, but often humorous as well, these stories creep up on you and take you by surprise.

Is there a barrier dividing our everyday world from the dark unknown? If so, is it broken sometimes by alien creatures or by the dead returning?

Why else should three successive crews flying a Second World War bomber be driven to madness, despair, even to death, though the plane returns from each mission without a scratch? What is the mysterious smell in Roger and Biddy's house and what could account for the series of extraordinary thefts in Sergeant Nice's sleepy seaside town; surely the work of no human hand...?

'A master of the unexpected, the macabre and the beguiling twist of plot, Westall is at his most provocative and intriguing with this collection'
VAL BIERMAN