Death and the Seaside

A note to US-based customers: All Lit Up is pausing print orders to the USA until further notice. Read more

A NOW MAGAZINE MUST-READ BOOK FOR FALL 2019

Nearing thirty, with an abandoned degree and half-hearted dreams of becoming a writer, Bonnie Falls finally moves out of her parents’ home and into a shabby flat. When her enigmatic landlady takes an interest in her—and one of her unfinished stories—Bonnie’s aspirations are rekindled, and she’s quickly persuaded by the older woman’s suggestion that they go on holiday to a seaside town like the one in the story. A tense exploration of power and vulnerability, obsession and manipulation, Death and the Seaside is a masterpiece of form and gripping psychological novel about the stories that we tell ourselves.

AUTHOR

Alison Moore

Alison Moore’s first novel, The Lighthouse, was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize and the National Book Awards, winning the McKitterick Prize. Both The Lighthouse and her second novel, He Wants (Biblioasis, 2016), were Observer Books of the Year. Her most recent novel is Death and the Seaside (forthcoming from Biblioasis). Her short fiction has been included in Best British Short Stories and Best British Horror anthologies and broadcast on BBC Radio. The title story of her debut collection, The Pre-War House and Other Stories, won a novella prize. Her first children’s book, Sunny and the Ghosts, will be published in the UK in 2018.

Reviews

Praise for Death and the Seaside

“As with earlier masters of the genre such as Daphne du Maurier, Moore creates a psychological thriller dripping with foreboding…Another triumph from Moore, her clear and unambiguous writing style as well as her ability to build tension will appeal to both adolescents and adults.”
—Jacqueline Snider, Library Journal (starred review)

“Moore excels at mining the mundanity of life for profound emotional impact…heartbreaking.”
—Kirkus Reviews

“A concise and satisfying psychological drama that explores the intersection of stories and life as well as power, obsession and fear … Moore has a sense for just the right image to expose the uncanny fissure in an apparently ordinary moment … This is not the sort of novel that achieves its impact with violence and shocking plot twists. In fact, the understated quality of the action serves only to highlight Moore’s insight into the places where relationships, art and everyday life might turn into something strange and revealing.”
—Winnipeg Free Press

“An intense and deftly scripted exploration of power and vulnerability, obsession and manipulation, Death and the Seaside showcases author Alison Moore’s genuine flair for original and impressive storytelling skills for producing gripping psychological novel that will hold the reader’s attention from first page to last.”
—Midwest Book Review

“Book of the day. Dense, complex, thought-provoking, it manages to be at once a fairytale and a philosophical treatise, high-octane thriller and literary interrogation. Like the dreams that haunt Bonnie’s night-times, it holds its secrets close, and repays careful rereading. The end of the novel, abrupt and death-haunted, feels as neat and tight as a key in a lock, and sheds light on the mysteries that have gone before.”
—Sarah Crown, The Guardian

“She is both gifted stylist and talented creator of a new English grotesque.”
—Isabel Berwick, Financial Times

Praise for Alison Moore:

“Moore is a serious talent. There’s art here. There’s care.”
—Sam Leith, The Financial Times

“Alison Moore paints [her characters] with careful precision…tight and provocative writing.”
—Minneapolis Star Tribune

“Starkly written and suspenseful, this novel… is a slow burn of jealousy, anger, and anxiety that reads like a drama peeked at through a crack in a door. Moore’s prose is sharp and often sparse, while her characters are loathsome and sympathetic by turns. Complex and thrilling, this meditation on the past is a gripping story of betrayal and its lingering effects.”
—Kirkus Reviews (for The Lighthouse)

“Moore’s deceptively simple style perfectly suits this tale of memory, sadness, and self-doubt … [A] satisfying, mysterious novel.”
—Publisher’s Weekly

“[There’s] a quiet sense of sadness that dogs these characters. As they navigate their lives, Moore slowly unearths their essential fears, regrets, and unmet desires, producing a subdued and beautiful feeling of yearning that leaves the reader ruminating long after the final page. A masterful collection.”
—Kirkus Reviews (for The Pre-War House)

“These stories possess an eerie stillness … Moore is a master of saying much with few words. The titular, final story seamlessly weaves together memory and family history. A few stories qualify as flash fiction, so readers might start there—and that should be all it takes to get hooked. They’ll also be intrigued by the stories’ endings, which all come with a little hitch. Although these are not happy tales, they are satisfying reads. Moore is the real deal.”
—Booklist

“Alison Moore’s collection … is threaded by a sense of unease that speaks to the uncertainty of life’s calm patterns … Moore’s writing is surprising and exact … [the title story] brings the collection to a powerful crescendo.”
—Arkansas International

“How she achieves such big impact with such small ingredients is a mystery to me, but she does. She bloody well does.”
—Gav Collins, Gav’s Book Reviews

“Alison Moore is very good on modern alienation… She doesn’t so much lay bare a life as shine blinding pinpricks into its darkest corners.”
—Claire Allfree, Metro

Awards

There are no awards found for this book.

Excerpt from Death and the Seaside:

Sometimes, Susan woke to find that her limbs were dead. Her arm would be flung back, bent beneath her head, the blood stopped, and she would have to move it with her other hand, the dead weight unsettling her, as if she had woken to find a ten-pound leg of lamb lying on her pillow; or one leg would be lying lifeless beneath the other, and she would have to lift the numb leg with both hands, holding it under the thigh and hanging it over the side of her bed like a Christmas stocking that wanted filling. This had been happening to her for as long as she could remember.

This morning, it was her right leg. Sitting on the edge of her mattress, she stretched her blood starved toes, the nasty comfort of pins and needles bringing her leg fizzing back to life.

She had no curtains at her window, nothing to buffer the daylight in those first few minutes of being awake. She had been promised curtains but, in the meantime, it did not bother her too much. Her room was in the attic, so it was not like anyone walking by could see in. Each morning, she woke to see the window framing the bare sky. The lack of curtains only troubled her if she woke in the night and saw the cold window with all that darkness outside, that big black rectangle in the middle of the long wall.

Her cigarettes were on the windowsill. She stood, testing her foot, feeling only a residual tingling, like froth left popping on the sand when a wave pulls away. She crossed the room and opened the window, letting in the brisk sea air. Leaning on the windowsill, she lit a cigarette. She looked out at the quiet street and the churning waters beyond it.

In the coming week, there would be a bonfire on the beach; there was a poster advertising it on the wall in the pub. They would burn the old fishing boats too, like a sacrificial offering on a funeral pyre.

She smoked her cigarette down to the butt and blew the smoke outside, blowing it downwards, though it drifted up. The slabbed pavement reminded her of a dream she’d had when she was small, in which she jumped from her bedroom window to the patio slabs below and sank, very comfortably, into the ground, as if she were Mr Soft, as if nothing could hurt her. ‘It wouldn’t be like that though,’ her mum had said, in the kitchen in the morning. ‘You’d be lucky just to break your legs.’

Susan let go of her cigarette end and watched it fall to the pavement. She thought of that thing about a feather and a brick descending at exactly the same speed, or a ton of feathers and a ton of bricks. That was in a vacuum though, or on the moon or something. The butt hit the ground and Susan closed the window.

She got dressed, pulling on skinny jeans patched at the knees, and a thin, blue jumper with suede patches on the elbows. She was lanky, all legs, like the harvestmen that so unnerved her. If a predator got hold of a harvestman’s leg, the harvestman could just detach it, as if it were a joke leg. It made Susan think of the fake limbs that she had seen used in art and magic, to create an illusion or just to give someone a fright. She thought of the rubber hand deception, where the imitation hand began to feel like a person’s real hand. The harvestman’s leg was not a fake though; the escaping harvestman left the abandoned limb twitching in the predator’s jaw. Since childhood, animals with spindly legs and backwards knees had set Susan’s teeth on edge. She remembered seeing an emu at the zoo. Something about the way it ran, the way its legs bent the wrong way, had made her cry.