A fantasy world, of course, for Richard, Robin and Nigel, the club’s members, are ordinary boys from ordinary families, who just happen to share a taste for the macabre in films and videos, books and comics. And then they admit a fourth member to their club — Toady, a far from ordinary boy with a taste for the macabre in real life. From the moment he lures the others into a nerve-jangling seance in a house with a chilling reputation, their lives are blighted by worse horror than they have ever imagined.

In a fusion of nightmare and reality, terror stalks the familiar streets of a sleepy seaside town and waits to invade the safest home. The pervasive stain of evil spreads like ripples on a pond, leaving a trail of sacrilege and death in its wake. One by one the members of the Horror Club are overcome and forced into a netherworld, halfway between illusion and reality. It is up to the final member to fight alone against the evil they have unleashed — until, in the final battle, he is joined by an unexpected ally…

Complete with Printed Paper Case binding as well as a brand-new introduction by the author, Toady is a staggering achievement. BFS Award-nominated author Mark Morris takes all the established horror conventions and reworks them in a way that is completely fresh and inimitably his own, in this, his first novel.

Reviews:

Like the missing link between Stephen King’s It and a post-watershed Grange Hill, Morris’s reprinted début novel is a blood-flecked snow-storm that will wrap itself around the reader and carry them into a winter of terrifying discontent. […] Read it in the summer to cool you down like literary ice cream or during the winter months to listen to the chilly howling wind outside as you read by bedside light, but just read it.

— Stuart Weightman; Starburst Magazine;
Issue #346; Jan 10, 2007