Black Mamba

Daisy Johnson's Sisters meets The Babadook in a stunning literary suburban chiller of grief, ghosts and sublimated sexual desire...

Daddy, there's a man in our room...

This is the chilling announcement Alfie hears one night, when he wakes in his quiet, suburban house to find his twin daughters at the foot of his bed. It's been nine months since Pippa - their mother - suddenly died and they've been unsettled ever since, so Alfie assumes they've probably had a nightmare. Still, he goes to check to reassure the girls. As expected he finds no man, but in the following days the girls begin to refer to someone called Black Mamba. What seemingly begins as an imaginary friend quickly develops into something darker, more obsessive, potentially violent. Alfie finds himself struggling to cope, and so he turns to Julia - Pippa's twin and a psychotherapist - for help.
But as Black Mamba's coils tighten around the girls, Alfie and Julia must contend with their own unspoken sense of loss, their unacknowledged attraction to one another, and the true character of the presence poisoning the twins' minds...

A darkling tale of tragedy, hauntings and sexual desire, Black Mamba is a novel of a father's love for his struggling daughters, and a widower's growing love for a woman after his wife's death. With smart, gothicky touches and a large and generous challenge to our assumptions of what and who constitutes a modern family, it explores both the limits we'll go to for our children and the sunken taboos of grief - of how erotics can still exist, and can even be life giving, after suffering loss.

Beautifully pitched between the literary and the commercial, Black Mamba uses the grammar of horror to explore grief...and suppressed sexual desire.

Elevated horror is a booming marketplace in film and television with hits such as The Babadook, Birdbox and The Haunting of Hill House. Black Mamba brings that kind of storytelling back to literary fiction.

'Great fun... the suspense slips its slow coils around you', Daily Mail

'Fans of literary horror will be absolutely captivated... I found it almost impossible to put down', Horror Magazine