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'The Picture Of Contented New Wealth' Released As Audiobook
John Doran , December 11th, 2020 10:19

Hear the horror novel read convincingly by an urbane gent who sounds like he may have a favourite axe

To mark the tenth anniversary of The Picture Of Contented New Wealth winning Gold in the Independent Publishers Awards for Horror Writing, Repeater has released a new audiobook of the publication this week.

You can get hold of the book – read dynamically by its author, the saw-tooth-wave-voiced man of letters, Repeater supremo and occasional tQ scribe, Tariq Goddard – by visiting Audible's website.

Repeater has this to say about the novel: "In the brilliant red doom of a Hampshire sunset, Brigit Conti can hear a voice behind her ears that is not her own. Bed-bound and complaining of a rare bone disease that no doctor can diagnose, her husband fears that the house they have purchased is a portal through which an older, more malign energy has passed, possessing his wife and son. Through their successive deterioration, his secular and agnostic world-view undergoes a metamorphosis, drawing him to a strange man from the hills: the Rector, their unlikely saviour.

"Or are he and his family merely victims of their own self-serving yuppie way of life?

"The Picture Of Contented New Wealth is a gothic tragedy set in the 1980s, bringing proper characterisation and a literary sensibility to the traditional horror story. Its mix of generic elements and mystical realism deal with the irreducibility of evil and its successful normalisation in to our daily and dominant reality."