Witnesses Are Gone

'A masterwork of paranoid, destabilizing weird fiction.' Paul Tremblay, author of The Pallbearers Club'A poet of misfits, outsiders and the forsaken, his empathy for their suffering ever poignant.' Adam Nevill, author of The Ritual'Stark and thrumming with a forbidden, eldritch energy.' Matt Wesolowski, author of Demon<p?WITH A NEW INTRODUCTION BY M. JOHN HARRISON(The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again, winner of the Goldsmith Prize 2020)Moving into an old and decaying house, Martin Swann discovers a box of video cassettes in the garden shed. One of them is a bootleg copy of a morbid and disturbing film by obscure French director, Jean Rien. The discovery leads Martin on a search for the director's other films, and for a way to understand Rien's filmography, drawing him away from his home and his lover into a shadowy realm of secrets, rituals and creeping decay. An encounter with a crazed film journalist in Gravesend leads to drug-fuelled visions in Paris and finally to the Mexican desert where a grim revelation awaits. The Witnesses Are Gone is a first-hand account of a journey into the darkest parts of the underworld a look behind the screen on which our collective nightmares play.