Horror fiction

Christopher Fowler was almost absurdly prolific, for much of his life combining fiction with a hectic job heading a film promotion company (he wrote the Alien tagline ‘In space no one can hear you scream’). His debut, the horror novel Roofworld, was inspired by the view from the top of his Soho office building. Soho Black took a satirical poke at the film world, while Spanky set a sexy demon loose in London. More novels, many collections of short stories and three memoirs followed. The millennium saw a switch to crime fiction, with Full Dark House, which introduced his elderly detective duo, Arthur Bryant and John May, of London’s Peculiar

Susan Barker’s Old Soul opens with pages from a diary: ‘T’ records a late-night conversation with a woman known as ‘E’ as they watch Venus rise. While they talk, we learn that Venus ‘spins slowly, at the pace of a walking man’, so one day is longer than a year. E imagines she is there, walking towards a sun that never sets. When T says that sounds lonely, E is adamant it wouldn’t be. This strange fragment sets the tone for a sinister horror story in which one woman – who goes by many names but is often simply ‘the woman’ – has an unnaturally prolonged life, serving an entity