Dark Echo - Brossura

'F.G. Cottam has crafted a superb and tautly told tale . . . A perfect ghost story' (The Times)
'F.G. Cottam's complex, tautly atmospheric thriller delivers plenty of chills . . . the perfect dark winter night yarn' (Daily Mail)

'Beautifully written and highly engaging' (Daily Mirror)

'A terrifying encounter with manifest evil . . . chilling novel . . . His adrenaline-charged prose is drawn tight with suspense' (James Urquhart, Financial Times on THE HOUSE OF LOST SOULS )

'Full of interest and not a little tension . . . (Cottam) knows a lot more about good writing than his supposedly more upmarket competitors' (Guardian)

'A very good read . . . the characters are convincing, the settings authentic and it is well paced, with room for slow menace as well as hectic action' (Historical Novels Review)

'Just the thing for a dark, cold January night: a supernatural spine-chiller and a romantic heart-warmer.'(Saga)

'Extremely well-written . . . Old-fashioned suspense combined with modern horror imagery to produce a fine example of the genre.' (The Times on THE HOUSE OF LOST SOULS )

'Cottam has crafted a well-paced horror thriller.' --Sunday Canberra Times

F.G. Cottam on the inspiration behind Dark Echo:

'Cursed boats are not quite as plentiful in folklore as haunted houses. But they are not far off. Sailors are superstitious (you might think rightly so) and tales of weird events occuring at sea abound. I wrote about a haunted house in The House of Lost Souls and there seemed a sort of logic to following that novel with one concerning a vessel with a malign history. The main difference was that if you can find the front door, you can in theory flee a haunted house. It is much trickier to discover, in the vastness of the ocean, that the boat you are aboard deserves its bloody and unlucky reputation.

'My own father was a sailor and as a very young child, I was confronted with the sometimes supernatural dangers and enduring mysteries of the sea in bed-time stories he always insisted were true.

'Dark Echo was probably inspired by some of those long ago told tales. The builder of my unlucky boat, Harry Spalding, is based on a real life Jazz Age playboy. Fiction of this sort does not, I don't believe, need to be based on fact. But it does need to be convincing. I hope this story is plausible enough to inflict a few chills on its readers.' --F.G. Cottam's forthcoming novel THE WAITING ROOM is out on 24th June 2010.

A former magazine editor, F.G. Cottam has two children.