Coil

In this gritty horror-scifi novel by Ren Warom, Bone Adams is a legend, the best mortician in the spires. When a new killer begins leaving bodies twisted and bent into grotesque pieces of art, City Officer Stark tasks Bone to unravel the clues. As more victims are discovered, Bone and Stark are drawn deeper into a world where pain and personal statement blend and blur, and finally end up hunting for a semi-mythical man-machine named Burneo deep within the sewers. But things aren't what they seem. While searching for Burneo, Bone and Stark discover a hidden lab full of evidence of horrific abuses of science and experimentation. Meanwhile, the killer is still on the loose, and, as Stark becomes more and more obsessed with the case, Bone is forced to a shattering realization. Everything is connected: the killings, the gang activity, the labs, and his own past. Unless he can figure out how, he won't survive. About the Author Ren Warom lives in the West Midlands with her children, her cat-pack, a snake called Marvin, and innumerable books. She’s currently pursuing a PhD and thinks she may have lost her mind. If you find said mind, please return in a secure, locked box to the address on the collar. Do not, repeat, do not, attempt to feed it! Thank you. Excerpt Black eyes cold as the icy ground, Stark surveys the Wharf Guard tanks squatted like grey toads in front of Wharf End’s imposing tenements. Behind their stolid presence, yellow tape crackles, and grim-faced Wharf Guards hold formation, bulky in winter uniform. Most residents may have left this part of the Wharf, but the gang folk haven’t. This is Broken Saints territory. Attack is not only possible, but fully anticipated, and the Guards are a line of tension, fit to snap. Stark can’t fault their unease. There’s something about this case; a subtle but unpleasant pall of ill fortune, bleeding back through the horrors faced by the victims, the awful isolation of their deaths. And here it is, too, this fucking case, leading him back to where he was born: to where he died. To where Teya’s face rises with such crystal clarity, he could reach out and wipe the tears from her eyes. He believes in coincidence, in the arbitrary nature of life. He’s seen all too often how horror arises from the insipid, the mundane. But in this case, right from the beginning, he’s been struck by a powerful sense of pattern, of convergence. Past and present colliding. Now here’s this body, in this place of all places, and every instinct he possesses screams that this is a message. Twofold. One for him, from someone he never thought to hear from again, and one for someone else. Someone he desperately needs on this case: Bone Adams, the premier Mort in all the Spires, whose attention to detail and vast array of connections in the Zone are sorely needed here. He’s put two formal requests for Bone through his office at City Central to the Notary Board, the Spires governing body, and they’ve rejected him outright each time, citing cost and logistical difficulty, which is so much bullshit, he could mulch a state farm with it. Bending to lean through the back door of his car, Stark grabs his coat. “Don’t bother waiting,” he says to his driver Tal. “This one’s an all nighter.” Slamming the door, he cracks his knuckles and strides to the nearest private. “Is De Lyon here?” “No, sir. He called in. Said to tell you to get the Buzz Boys to bag it up and send it to him; there’s no way he’s stepping foot on Saints territory, not for another Doe.” Stark twitches, his muscles bunching beneath cheap polyfibre, and barely restrains himself from unleashing a tirade on the blameless private. It’s not his fault that De Lyon is as inordinately determined as the Notary Board to see nothing in these nameless bodies. To leave them as they’re being found: abandoned to die. “Buzz Boys in then?” “No, sir. Like I said, that’s been left down to you.” Stark nods, biting back a grin. “There’s my first good news.” De Lyon, the Mort assigned to the case, a man about as useless and self-important as it gets, has gone and handed Stark the excuse he needs to act. He gestures the private aside, impatient. “I’m calling in another Mort to look at this. Send him corpse-side as soon as he arrives.”  “Sir.” The private snaps a salute. “I’m not army, boy,” Stark mutters. “Not anymore.” He moves on, thickset and gruff, his body like his temper; short, built on a grand scale. Unfazed by the smell, he pulls aside pieces of tape as if they’re cobwebs, and steps inside the shattered entrance. This place is a miserable hole, airless, corridors thin as choked arteries and black with the greasy soot of living. Stark resists the impulse to fend his way through. He doesn’t like the uncontrollable sense of urgency, the copper tang of remembered fear these conditions spark, memories of a personal history he’s worked hard to disown.