I am thrilled to be hosting a spot
on the AND HE SHALL APPEAR by Kate van der Borgh Blog Tour hosted by Rockstar Book Tours. Check out
my post and make sure to enter the giveaway!
About The Book:
Author: Kate van der Borgh
Pub. Date: October 1, 2024
Publisher: Union Square Co.
Formats: Hardcover, eBook, Audiobook
Pages: 336
Find it: Goodreads, https://books2read.com/AND-HE-SHALL-APPEAR
From a mesmerizing new literary voice
comes a story of obsessive friendship, chilling powers, and untimely death for
readers of dark academia classics like If We Were Villains and The
Secret History.
An unnamed narrator arrives at Cambridge University in the early aughts
determined to reinvent himself. His northern accent marks him as an
outsider, but thanks to his musical gifts, he manages to fall in with
his wealthy classmate, Bryn Cavendish.
A charismatic party host and talented magician, Bryn enthralls the
narrator. But something seems to happen to those who challenge or
simply irk Bryn—and they aren’t ever the same again.
The narrator begins to suspect that Bryn may be concealing terrifying gifts
under the guise of magic tricks. As the tension between them grows, a harrowing
encounter is followed by Bryn’s death.
Alternating between their time as students and the narrator’s return to
Cambridge years later, where he fears the ghosts of his past are waiting
for him, And He Shall Appear performs an astounding
slight-of-hand that throws every version of the story into question.
This propulsive novel about the dark power of privilege will haunt readers like
a familiar piece of music with endless iterations.
Excerpt:
Nobody is afraid of the past. What
we’re afraid of is the past coming loose. We’re afraid that it might free
itself from where we left it and, like a lengthening shadow on an empty
street, slip silently after us until we feel it brushing at our
heel.
I can’t prove what happened
between him and me all those years ago, behind those exalting college
walls. Nor can I prove what’s happening now. But plenty of truths defy
physical evidence. Yes, we can make claims, but could you prove to
someone that they were the best friend you ever had? Could you verify your
regret at how terribly you let them down? What about your fear, your
implacable, immeasurable fear that they will never forgive you for
it—never forgive, and never forget?
Before I met him, I’d only had one
experience I couldn’t explain. Something that happened when I was a child.
It surprised me, because it wasn’t like the stories we told as we sat
cross-legged behind the dilapidated science block, hidden from the dinner
ladies who circled the asphalt like blue rinsed sharks. In our Ghost Club
tales—about the spirit that crept between the row of sari shops and the
big Tesco, about the creature that stalked the wasteland where, long ago,
the cotton mills stood—the fear was clear and sharp, like sherbet
on the tongue. But what happened to me was hazy, as if it existed at the
very edge of understanding, of reality. I remember it like this:
I was sitting up in bed, wrapped
in my ThunderCats duvet, peering at the shapes made unfamiliar by the
dark. In the corner, my music stand leaned like the mast of a sinking
ship, next to my battered clarinet case and a neglected football. On my
chest of drawers my action figurines stood, all—I knew without being able
to discern their faces—with their gazes turned toward me. The silence
felt a long way from morning. Something had woken me, I realized. Not
a sound. A feeling, maybe.
There was someone in the
house.
I had never been a brave boy, and
there’s no denying that I felt deeply frightened then. But I also felt a low,
irresistible pull. While I was terrified to discover whatever was moving
in the night, I was somehow more afraid of not seeing it. Which is
why I rustled softly out of bed and stepped soundlessly out of my
room.
When my eyes finally adjusted to
the darkness, I looked toward the bedroom at the end of the landing.
Through the door, open just a crack, was my mum’s sleeping body,
reflected in the mirrored wardrobe, made sickly by the light of her clock
radio. There was no spectral figure floating beside her, no maniac
raising a flashing blade. No movement but for the rise and fall of her
chest with each unconscious breath.
I moved on to the bathroom. The
streaks of moonlight on the tiles, the faint smell of bleach—all this
made the space feel strangely antiseptic. My tongue became sticky
at the thought that I might discover a figure stretched out in the
bath, its clawed hands ready to curl around the candy striped shower
curtain. But when I edged forward and peered into the tub, there was only
the dripping shower head dangling like a hanged man, gazing sightlessly
into the blackness of the plughole. Bare toes plucking at the cold
vinyl, I reversed out of the room and back onto the landing. Clutching the
banister, I descended the stairs (stretching myself over the final step, which,
for reasons I couldn’t articulate, I never liked to touch) and made my
way into the living room, where the battered recliner hunched in
the corner and the rug reached tasseled fingers across the floor.
Fearful of what I might see, or perhaps of what might see me, I left the
lights off as I padded across the carpet, peeking behind the sofa and
beneath the coffee table as I went. The house, unremarkable during the
day, was peculiar in the gloom. It crouched and whispered behind my back.
When I looked toward the curtains, drawn tightly across the bay
window, I had the vertiginous sensation that what was behind them was not
normal, and that if I opened them and looked out into the night I might
see something other than the usual pebble-dashed terraces, the ordinary,
overgrown gardens. Approaching the window sidelong, I took the edge
of one curtain between my fingertips. Peeled it delicately from the
glass. From the darkness beyond emerged a face, so close I could see the
shadows under its eyes, and I would have cried out had my breath not
seized in my chest—but the face was only my own, reflected ghastly, and
beyond it the street, empty and still.
Nerves thrumming, I carried on,
past the dining table piled high with laundry ready for ironing, past the
sagging spider plant and its crisping fronds. Finally, into the
kitchen, lit only by the faltering street lamp outside. On my left
was the sink, where metallic drips landed on sauce-crusted pans,
overseen by the stained kettle and crumb-dusted toaster.
Opposite these was the cooker,
flanked by cupboards of plates and bowls, chipped mugs and old jugs, and
empty jam jars. As ever, there was the smell of damp cloths and
cooled cooking fat. But beneath this, something else—something
organic, like freshly turned soil. There, straight ahead of me, the door
leading into the little pantry, with its panel of frosted glass.
And someone behind it.
I froze. Stared. The silhouette
was blurred but for small, dark rounds where its fingertips pressed on
the glass. Its head swayed from side to side, a serpentine movement
that made me shudder. I wondered whether it—whatever it was—could
see me in the darkness. Whether it could hear me, or smell me.
The important thing was to avoid
alerting it to my presence, to stay perfectly still while I worked out what to
do. How did it get there? The door behind which it stood was the
only way into the pantry, the only way out. Perhaps, I thought with a
shiver, the thing had always been inside and we’d simply never
known.
As I stood, it rapped hard at the
door.
I skittered backward, terror
thrilling through my body, my legs charged with the impulse to run. I
wanted to call my mum. But still I felt that grim, reckless
need—urgent now—to stay, to see it for myself. Taking a moment to
slow my breath, I forced my feet toward the door, my body hunched as if
braced for impact. Inhaled, exhaled.
I clasped the door handle, turned.
Pulled.
Waiting behind the door was my
father. But he wasn’t the right age, not the age he was when I last saw
him, the age at which he died. He was a boy like me, maybe ten or
eleven. Instead of being florid and riddled with spider veins, his cheeks
were now fair and dappled with freckles, while his strawberry blonde hair
was styled neatly in a short-back
and-sides. He looked like a
character from an Enid Blyton book, like he did in the black and white
photos I’d once found in a disintegrating carrier bag. Alongside my
terror, there came a confusion of feelings: anger for everything
that had happened, relief that the person I’d thought was gone was, in
fact, not. Here was a chance to speak to him again. But it seemed strange
to call another child Dad, and I found myself fumbling over how to say
hello. I felt babyish then, standing mute in my too-short pajamas, and I
thought perhaps I might cry. He didn’t notice. He looked past me,
into the darkness that hung deeper in the house.
Then, somehow, my mum’s hands were
on my shoulders, her voice soaring over my head. “Can I help you?” she
asked him, her tone blandly tolerant, as if she were speaking to a very old
person or a salesman.
They stared at one another. Then
my dad opened his mouth, so wide that it looked as if he might dislocate
his jaw, as if he were letting my mum inspect his teeth. Then he
reached out, would have touched me had Mum not drawn me sharply backward.
I realized that she didn’t recognize the person in front of us.
I wriggled, straining to see her
face, but she only held me tighter. I called out: Don’t you see who it
is? Look at the eyes. But with a swipe, Mum slammed the door and
dragged me out of the kitchen. My feet skidding on the linoleum, I
started to scream. There was the shadow, still shifting, restless, behind
the door, with nothing to do but keep waiting to be let in.
When I told them, the members of
Ghost Club were unimpressed. “So it was a dream?” one said.
“Well,” I said. “Sort of,
but—”
“So it’s not true, then. Not a
proper ghost story.” I wondered how to explain that this dream world had
contained a jagged tear of reality. “But it really was my dad. Coming
back.”
“How’d you know?”
“I know.”
“But how?”
“I just do!”
“What did he want, then?”
I shrugged. I hadn’t understood my
dad even when he was alive.
“So your dad,” whispered one slow
learner, the know ledge arriving in her head like a long-delayed train, “is dead?”
That afternoon I noticed children whispering and pointing. Some gave me extra
room as they passed, as if I were carrying a population of head lice or a
virulent strain of flu. Later, I found I’d been nicknamed—in that
on-the-nose way of primary schoolers—Spooky, and I resolved not to talk to
the others about my dad again.
Some time later, puzzling over my
dream, I asked my mum: If a person was born with no legs, would their
ghost have no legs too? Rummaging in the fridge, she said she
supposed so. But what if, I went on, someone was born with legs but lost
them in an accident? If they came back as a ghost would they have
legs or not? I remember staring down at my boiled egg, at my toast
soldiers queuing for a dip, trying not to look at the pantry door. My mum
handed me a glass of orange squash and told me I was being a very morbid
boy.
But I couldn’t stop thinking about
it. Why wouldn’t an old man revisit his loved ones as his younger,
stronger self? Why did we assume he’d spend eternity with arthritis
in his fingers and a bend in his back? And if I died (because at
that age I was still convinced that death would happen to everyone but
me), would I get to choose my own eternal form? Or would it be chosen by
God, by the Devil, or by something else?
I thought of the silly little boy
I’d been only a few years ago: the one too scared to cross the road by
himself, who couldn’t sleep without his ladybird night-light. I
couldn’t stand to be like that forever. Even worse, what if my mum
spent eternity as a child too? How, in the afterlife, would she make my
favorite sandwiches, crisp-and-ketchup, with the crusts cut off? She
wouldn’t be allowed to use a knife.
I also worried that the dream
might come back. It hadn’t been scary as such—not a proper nightmare,
scrabbling at the walls of a well or shambling down a twilit hospital corridor.
But it had sunk beneath my skin, left a memory like a bruise. On the edge
of sleep I sometimes jolted myself awake, thinking I’d heard that knock
again. Perhaps he’d be a teen ager this time, or a baby wailing in a Moses
basket. Perhaps he’d be a pensioner with eyes dull as an old fish, his
mouth puckered, older than he ever became in real life. And, who ever he
was, perhaps my mum would still slam the door shut.
I’d almost forgotten about the
dream when it returned, in my final year of university. But, this time,
when I stood in that spectral kitchen gripping the door handle, I knew
that the person behind the door wasn’t my dad. It was someone else, someone
more recently lost to me. Thankfully, in the moments before the door
shushed open, I forced myself awake.
As I lay sweating in the aftermath
of the dream, I wondered: Which version of him had been waiting for me
behind the rippled glass? Would he have appeared as my best friend? Or my
worst enemy?
While I’d never known the meaning
of the original dream, I understood this new one all too well. It was
a warning that he wasn’t gone for good. Maybe one day, terribly awake,
I’d catch an uncertain glimpse of him shifting through a crowd at a train
station, or I’d pass him at a pedestrian crossing in the driving rain.
Perhaps I’d find him waiting in the stairwell outside the flat. Who would
he be, then? Would he return to me as the tortured soul or the
scene-stealing showman, the conqueror or the conquered?
I didn’t know. But I was sure of
two things. He would definitely come back. And when he did, he wouldn’t
bother to knock.
About Kate van der Borgh:
By
day, Kate van der Borgh is a freelance copywriter, and by
night, she’s usually composing or playing music. She grew up in Lancashire and
went on to study music at Cambridge, so there’s a reasonable amount of her in
her narrator—including the fact that she was a pianist and reluctant
bassoonist. She has, however, never had reason to suspect that her best friend
has occult powers. Her short fiction has been published by The Fiction
Desk, and she’s a graduate of Faber’s six-month Writing a Novel course. She is
based in London.
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Giveaway Details:
1 winner
will receive a finished copy of AND HE SHALL APPEAR, US Only.
Ends October 15th, midnight EST.
a Rafflecopter giveawayTour Schedule:
Week One:
|
9/30/2024 |
Excerpt |
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10/1/2024 |
Excerpt/IG Post |
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10/2/2024 |
Excerpt/IG Post |
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10/3/2024 |
Excerpt/IG Post |
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10/4/2024 |
Excerpt/IG Post |
Week Two:
|
10/7/2024 |
Review/IG Post |
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10/8/2024 |
Review/IG Post |
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10/9/2024 |
IG Review/TikTok Post |
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10/10/2024 |
Review/IG Post |
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10/11/2024 |
IG Review/TikTok Post |
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