John Blackburn was born in 1923 in the village of Corbridge, England, the second son of a clergyman. He started attending Haileybury College near London in 1937, but his education was interrupted by the onset of World War II; the shadow of the war, and that of Nazi Germany, would later play a role in many of his works. He served as a radio officer during the war in the Mercantile Marine from 1942 to 1945, and resumed his education afterwards at Durham University, earning his bachelor's degree in 1949. Blackburn taught for several years after that, first in London and then in Berlin, and married Joan Mary Clift in 1950. Returning to London in 1952, he took over the management of Red Lion Books.

It was there that Blackburn began writing, and the immediate success in 1958 of his first novel, A Scent of New-Mown Hay, led him to take up a career as a writer full-time. He and his wife also maintained an antiquarian bookstore, a secondary career that would inform some of Blackburn's later work. A prolific author, Blackburn would write nearly 30 novels between 1958 and 1985; most of these were horror and thrillers, but also included one historical novel set in Roman times, The Flame and the Wind (1967). He died in 1993.

Children of the Night by John Blackburn

For centuries, the small English village of Dunstonholme has been the scene of mysterious tragedies. Local lore traces these strange events back to the year 1300, when a sect of Christian heretics known as the Children of Paul were involved in a bloody massacre. Since that time, there have been railway disasters, mining accidents, shipwrecks, and other terrible happenings. Now a wave of suspicious deaths has the locals on edge and looking for explanations. Dr. Tom Allen and adventurer J. Moldon Mott think they know what is behind the killings: an ancient evil, dating back seven hundred years, lies hidden underground—and it is preparing to emerge to the surface . . .

John Blackburn (1923-1993), the author of twenty-eight bestselling thrillers, has been hailed by The Times Literary Supplement as 'today's master of horror.' In his classic Children of the Night (1966), reprinted here for the first time in 40 years, Blackburn updates medieval legends and folklore to create a bone-chilling tale of modern-day horror that is among his very best.

CURATOR'S NOTE

In this rediscovered classic from British master of horror John Blackburn (1923-1993), a village cursed with centuries of tragedy and suspicious death faces the reemergence of an ancient evil. – Mike Allen

 

REVIEWS

  • "John Blackburn is today's master of horror, and this latest novel, about a village gripped by the culmination of ancient vileness, induces proper shivers."

    – Times Literary Supplement

  • "He is certainly the best British novelist in his field and deserves the widest recognition."

    – Penguin Encyclopedia of Horror and the Supernatural

  • "[A] stylish, genuinely chilling author . . . undoubtedly one of England's best practicing novelists in the tradition of the thriller novel."

    – St. James Guide to Crime & Mystery Writers
 

BOOK PREVIEW

Excerpt

No, it was impossible. Such things just didn't happen. Mott had rarely disliked two people as much as he did Bishop Fenge and his chaplain, but he felt he had to agree with them. Ainger must have been right round the bend.

And yet he hadn't written like a madman. Mott scowled across the gloomy reference-room of the Tynecastle public library. He had read the typescript twice now, and he could see that a devil of a lot of work had gone into it. It was an almost complete record of every out-of-the-way occurrence that had taken place in Dunstonholme since the Norman invasion.

Much of the material had been taken from word of mouth of course; legends and folk tales of children and very old people.

George Bridger, an eighty-five-year-old farm labourer, told me that his grandfather was amongst those who had recovered Pounder's body. 'He came into the kitchen, and though an abstemious man, he pulled out a bottle of gin, and he didn't put it back till it was a quarter empty. "It was no accident, whatever people tell you," he said to my mother. "Somebody or something drove those sheep down the valley, and they'd almost trampled the poor devil into the ground."'

A woman, Molly Carlin, had preceded Pounder's intention of living out on the moor during the eighteenth century and had been stoned to death as a witch. Her body was buried just outside the churchyard under a plain slab of granite, and children still believed that, if they ran three times round the square and then knelt down by the slab, they would hear her screaming.

Ainger had got a lot of material from books too, though, and had indexed his references. Mott opened the first volume of Propert's History of the North-Eastern Railway. The library had a fine section on local history and the attendants had been very helpful.

Work on the branch line between Welcott and Dunstonholme was finally abandoned in 1847. The generally accepted reasons for the company's failure were constant labour troubles, caused by radical agitators, and lack of capital preceding the collapse of George Hudson's 'Empire'. The author has no wish to contradict these theories completely, but would like to quote a statement made by a foreman ganger named Allan Robson. Robson had worked on railways all over the British Isles and cannot be regarded as a nervous character.

'All went well and smoothly till we started the cutting through Mossgill Moor, and then nothing was ever right again. The Irishmen walked off the job in a body after three days, and I can't say that I blame them. It was just as bad with the local chaps, and I've seen grown men throw down their picks and walk off the job, though their families were well nigh starving. There was something not canny about that place. You had the feeling that you were digging your way through into Hell. Even the soldiers who came to keep order felt it.'

So much for the railway. Mott picked up The Decline of the Middle Ages by Benson and Scott which had a chapter on the Children of Paul, with particular reference to their founder, Paul of Ely, or the Young Man from Ely, as he was sometimes called. The authors were violently partisan and anti-Catholic, and claimed on little evidence that Paul was a forerunner of Copernicus who had been persecuted and driven from his monastery on account of scientific curiosity. They stated that the most likely reason for the Dunstonholme massacre was that an evil parish priest had incited the villagers and the castle garrison to attack his followers, and closed with a eulogy. 'It may well be that, below the restless waters of the North Sea, perished a greater genius than Galileo; another victim of superstition and ignorance.'

Yes, insane or not, Ainger had checked his references thoroughly. Legends of the North-East Coast gave a detailed account of the local folklore, most of which had an extremely sinister quality; ghosts and demons walking the moors at night, and a monstrous blind thing called the Draken Worm that came out of the sea and carried off children. There was also a short section on the lead mine which bore a marked similarity to the events at the railway cutting.

Yes, Ainger had presented a lot of evidence. But his conclusions! Mott shook his head sadly as he closed the typescript. They were quite absurd. There was no mental or physical force to support them. Ainger had been deranged by too much study and morbid imagination.

And yet – and yet. The word kept running into his thoughts. There certainly did seem to be a connection between the events: some common and extremely evil cause. Mott leaned back in the chair and closed his eyes for a moment.