Hell's Mouth

When Andrew Tredinnick reported his wife missing at just after one o'clock on a dismal February morning, he didn't expect to be stood where he was only hours later.

It started as just a normal night out with the girls. Andrew kissed Shona goodbye in the low glow of his makeshift studio. He listened as the scrunching of rubber on gravel receded into the night. As the hours passed, the realisation that Shona wasn't coming home began to consume every rational thought.

Standing atop Hell's Mouth - an unmissable highlight on the Tour de Popular Cornish Suicide Sites - the North Atlantic roaring hungrily below, his wife's abandoned car sat forlorn in the desolate landscape behind, a tormented Andrew cowered under the weight of his only two options: One, return home and break it to the kids, who would be there worrying and formulating all manner of scenarios as to why neither of their parents were back yet. But how do you break that kind of news? Hi kids, I'm home, and by the way, your mum's dead and we're all possibly partly to blame. Or two, throw himself over the sheer face at his feet. Follow Shona into oblivion, or the pits of Hell, or whatever it is that noisily beckons its victims down there.

Hell's Mouth follows the Tredinnick family as they wade through the aftermath of a beloved wife and mother's apparent suicide. As Andrew slides deeper into alcoholism, lurching from one self-constructed disaster to the next at the risk of losing his youngest daughter, he fails to notice what's going on under his own roof. Cameron, his nineteen-year-old son, has developed a deadly obsession with Kerenza, Cameron's stepsister, three years younger than himself. With a ruthless determination to achieve his ultimate fantasy, is there anything Cameron won't do to get what he wants?

Auteur

Kevin Knuckey was born in Cornwall and raised on horror films from an inappropriately tender age, Horror Express and Salem's Lot particularly esteemed introductions. The first book he read cover-to-cover: The Jungle Book (Disney's rendition). The second: Stephen King's The Shining.

Inspired whilst working as a primary school teaching assistant, he began to plot his first children's book, though after pulling himself aside and having a serious chat with himself, he decided the targeted market was not ready for an old folk's home that processed its residents and served them through the sinister owner's freshest business venture, Old Biddy's Burgers.

Experiencing the physical deterioration that comes with Charcot-Marie-Tooth disorder however, Kevin has streamlined his attention, remaining true(ish) to the genre he was born into and thrives in, for the appropriate audience. With his debut psychological thriller Hell's Mouth, Kevin utilises his keen interest in the macabre, though confining the actions to within the brutal realms of human capability.