For disillusioned author Max Long, the offer of a
writing-fellowship on the mysterious-sounding ‘Burnt
Island’ is a godsend. Max is determined that, inspired
by his tenure on this windswept outpost, he will produce
every writer’s dream — the bestseller. And this time, he
plans to subvert his usual genre and write a horror
story. But upon arrival, Max’s fantasies of
hermetic island life are overturned when he encounters a
potential rival living in close proximity – the famously
reclusive James Fairfax, author of the
internationally-lauded novel, Lifeblood.
Fairfax’s critical and financial success with
Lifeblood, coupled with his refusal to court
the limelight, has long been the talk of the literary
circles. However, as the lives of the two men become
intertwined, Max cannot marry the myth of the
publicity-shy Fairfax with the apparently urbane and
confident reality. He begins to suspect that Fairfax is
not the true author of his exceptional debut. Moreover,
Max cannot escape the disturbing knowledge that
Fairfax’s wife has
disappeared. Recently-divorced and
struggling to keep a grip on his fragile mental state,
the vulnerable Max finds himself sliding into Fairfax’s
world. And he starts to witness alarming visions that
take the form of the horror he is attempting to write.
Who or what is the sinister, darting figure who appears
between the trees of Fairfax’s garden at night? Who is
the tiny, forlorn little girl who seems to need help?
And what has happened to Fairfax’s missing wife?
With an unnerving plotline in which we
encounter doppelgängers, ghostly forms and machines
masquerading as humans, Burnt Island is a
masterwork of subtle terror. At times evoking The
Wicker Man in its growing sense of paranoia and
undercurrent of eroticism, Thompson’s evocative,
compellingly-written story takes a grip on the reader as
inexorable as that of Burnt Island on Max Long. An
ironic satire on literary ambition, Thompson’s sixth
novel soon draws the reader into something much
darker.
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