"Achieves a level of excellence equivalent to one of Ramsey Campbell's books, neither condescending to his youthful readers nor slighting his adult ones. Now, that's a truly scary accomplishment!"—Asimov's SF magazine
The Ragged People: a story of the post-plague years
The Ragged People: a story of the post-plague years
(Most recent edition: June 2013; infinite press.)
Life in the refugee camp is hard for Dan and his brother Rick. They sleep huddled together with a thousand other refugees in an enormous warehouse, and they spend all day queuing for food and water and medicine, watched over by soldiers in anti-contamination masks. And all around them, people are dying: dying from hunger, dying from one of the new plagues, or dying simply because they have lost the will to live.
Selected from a line-up by the intimidating Mr Wiley, the boys leap at a chance to leave the camp and go to live in the Brightwell Community, but their hopes are soon dashed. Is a life of forced labour in a land at the mercy of raiding gangs and ever-mutating plagues really any better than the UN refugee camp had been?
A gripping post-apocalypse story of two brothers struggling to survive in a Britain devastated by biological warfare, from the author of the bestselling vampire novel Piggies.
'The king of children's horror' - Sunday Express
'Guaranteed to scare your socks off' - Glasgow Herald
'A bold, shocking and completely unputdownable horror story' - Waterstone's Books Quarterly
'A cut above the usual horror tale' - School Librarian
'Really spooky! I'd definitely try out other books by this author as Nick Gifford makes you want to keep reading' - Teen Titles
'One of the most original horror tales of recent times ... you'll have to go back quite a way to find a debut novel that is quite as striking as Piggies' - Rhyl and Prestatyn Journal
