High John the Conqueror

Praise

“Deranged police procedural meets darkly comic folk horror in Wild Wild Wessex. Utterly mesmerising.” – Jake Arnott, author of the The Long Firm and The Fatal Tree

“It’s going to be every outsider’s beach read, a doorway into the future.” – Mark Stewart, the Pop Group

“Enchanting. Goddard here comes into his own as the Gris-Gris man of English fiction.” – Patrick Wright

“Here, as in all of Tariq Goddard’s fiction, the ordinary and the uncanny, the mundane and the metaphysical—above all, the sardonic and the profound—merge with one another in some mysterious borderland that he alone seems to have explored. And High John the Conqueror may be his most entertaining novel yet.” – David Bentley Hart

“A masterwork of the uncanny. A trip into fresh, bizarre, thrilling new territory. Reading it is almost a hallucinatory experience—it takes daring swerves away from what we call reality, but stays close enough to life to get under your skin. By the end you’ll be altered on a cellular level, questioning what you thought you knew.” – Elvia Wilk, author of Oval: A Novel

“A wyrd & eerie tale for wyrd & eerie times, High John the Conqueror is, like High John de Conqueror itself, ‘a genuine hybrid and a one-off,’ crafting & grafting police noir, folk horror and occult parapolitics into an altered States of the Nation novel of monsters past and present. PD James meets MR James!” – David Peace

“This book is brilliant and crackles with wit, invention and insight.” – John Doran, The Quietus

“Hallucinatory yet gritty, Goddard’s novel is a genuine portrait of Britain’s shadowy underworld but intensified to a psychogenic peak.” – Andy Paciorek, Folk Horror Revival

“High John the Conqueror is that rare thing, a brilliantly shrewd page-turner. I couldn’t recommend it highly enough as, what-the-hell, a holiday read.” – Matthew Ingram