Published by Influx Press
(March 2018 - available for Pre-Order now)
‘The problems started
the day we moved to Hastings…’
When Gareth E. Rees
moves to a dilapidated Victorian house in Hastings he begins to piece together
an occult puzzle connecting Aleister Crowley, John Logie Baird and the Piltdown
Man hoaxer. As freak storms and tidal surges ravage the coast, Rees is beset by
memories of his best friend’s tragic death in St Andrews twenty years earlier.
Convinced that apocalypse approaches and his past is out to get him, Rees
embarks on a journey away from his family, deep into history and to the very
edge of the imagination. Tormented by possessed seagulls, mutant eels and
unresolved guilt, how much of reality can he trust?
The Stone Tide is a
novel about grief, loss, history and the imagination. It is about how people
make the place and the place makes the person. Above all it is about the
stories we tell to make sense of the world. (Taken from thebBlurb)
Gareth Rees has moved to Hastings. His house is a mess. He
is haunted by the half-remembered death of a childhood friend, the gradual
disintegration of his marriage and inexplicable attacks by seagulls. Hastings
is the last stomping ground of Aleister Crowley (noted dark magician and self-publicist)
the Piltdown Man hoaxer and John Logie Baird. What links these three figures
with Gareth Rees and his adventures in Hastings is an intricate and
heart-breaking puzzle that teeters on the edges of sanity.
This is a deeply personal piece of work. Like Marshland
before it, this is a life, a landscape and a mind examined. It is one that is
at once totally unique but also strikingly familiar, he appears to have
captured what it is to be trapped inside your own obsessive patterns of
thought, but, thrillingly (and reassuringly) he is able to navigate a way out
of the maze.
My own study is a little bit like Gareth Rees house in the
Stone Tide. I plan to put up shelves, get a desk I can work at and buy a swivel
chair that doesn’t keep descending when I am in the middle of a fruitful
sentence. But my own procrastination and imagination get in the way. The
machinations and misfiring synapses of my tired brain hold sway and construct a
more vivid narrative than the one the real world offers. I am often sideswiped
by my own obsessions and unwanted thoughts that gain weight and resonance by
the very fact that I try to avoid thinking about them. Rees does not do that,
he opens the haunted music box of his brain and lets us in, capturing the
nature of memory, obsession and dream perfectly. His work tears open the mind
and exposes its vulnerabilities, nightmares and delights. The process of
engaging with our own personal events and tragedies are bound up not only in
our bumbled memories of the past but also in fiction, history and dream. This
is the world that Gareth Rees invites us to explore.
We move seamlessly between his personal present and past
whilst occasionally shifting into real and imagined history. Each element of
the journey - whether it be exploring Hastings, re-imagining the final days of
the deeply pretentious Crowley, Rees’ own fevered remembrances of a lost friend
or the utterly painful examination of a failing marriage and the dreamlike
powerlessness to stop it – lays bare the complexities, flaws and delights of
the human condition.
There is a real heady rush in sifting through Rees memories
and experiences. He allows us into his home, into his imaginings and his mind.
He pulls apart his own inner and outer-life to enable us to examine our own.
Although The Stone
Tide is set in Hastings, raising this town on the edge of the world to a
mythical status through Rees’ esoteric exploration of its past and present;
this book is ultimately about living. Whilst this is an exciting, fast-moving
mix of travelogue, reminiscence, occult adventure and urban wyrd; in reality this
is a deeply personal, profoundly moving and truthful autobiography. Highly
recommended.
Chris Lambert
