The Captive - by Kit Burgoyne (Paperback)

About the Book

"Anti-corporate activists unwittingly unleash staggering supernatural forces when they kidnap a pregnant heiress, in a Rosemary's Baby for our conspiratorial 21st century. Kit Burgoyne (pen name of Booker-listed novelist Ned Beauman) is a startling new voice in horror: witty and appalling. Anti-capitalist guerrillas unwittingly unleash terrifying supernatural forces when they kidnap a pregnant heiress, in a Rosemary's Baby for our conspiratorial 21st century. For months, Luke and his underground revolutionary group have been planning their biggest operation yet: kidnapping 23-year-old Adeline Woolsaw. They don't want a ransom-they want to expose the Woolsaw Group, the source of Adeline's parents' enormous wealth, a vast yet largely anonymous company that runs everything from military bases and mental hospitals to commuter trains, call centers, and prisons. But the revolutionaries get a shock when they bundle Adeline into their van. She's about to go into labour. And she may not object to being kidnapped, if it allows her and the baby to escape her despotic parents. It quickly becomes apparent that this is no ordinary child. He's capable of setting off deadly weather events and summoning plagues of vermin. And that's just the beginning. Luke discovers that Adeline's parents engineered the pregnancy as part of a dark bargain with an ancient evil of nearly limitless power. Now the Woolsaws and their henchmen will stop at nothing to get the infant back, so they can establish an infernal new kingdom on Earth with their grandchild on the throne. Kit Burgoyne is a ruthlessly funny new voice in horror: as adept at skewering today's plutocratic overlords as he is at conjuring our most primeval nightmares"--

Book Synopsis

From a new voice in horror comes a satirical Rosemary's Baby for our conspiratorial present in which anti-capitalist activists unwittingly unleash terrifying demonic forces when they kidnap a pregnant heiress.

From Ned Beauman, the Man Booker Prize-longlisted author of The Teleportation Accident and Clarke Award-winning author of Venomous Lumpsucker.

For months, Luke and his underground revolutionary group have been planning their biggest operation yet: kidnapping twenty-three-year-old Adeline Woolsaw, heiress to a vast yet largely anonymous company that runs everything from military bases and mental hospitals to commuter trains, call centers, and prisons.
But the revolutionaries get a shock when they bundle Adeline into their van. She's about to go into labor. And she may not object to being kidnapped, if it allows her and the baby to escape her despotic parents. Her parents are the ones who made a deal with an ancient evil of nearly limitless power. Now the Woolsaws and their henchmen will stop at nothing to get the infant back, so they can establish an infernal new kingdom on Earth with their grandchild on the throne. Kit Burgoyne (pen name of Booker-listed author Ned Beauman) is a ruthlessly funny new voice in horror: witty, appalling, and as adept at skewering today's plutocratic overlords as he is at conjuring our most primeval nightmares.

Review Quotes

Praise for The Captive

CrimeReads Best Horror Fiction of the Year

"A thrilling, gory tale with comic details ('next to her daughter, everything else in the universe is just hair-clippings and pencil shavings') and a cosmic worldview ('large concentrations of wealth are like deformations in space-time: they warp reality around them')."
--The Minnesota Star Tribune

"Ned Beauman, writing here as Kit Burgoyne, is a clever writer whose previous work has made free with genre conventions and who isn't afraid to be funny . . . He is, as I say, having fun - and the reader of this accomplished and super-readable romp has fun too."
--The Guardian

"What would happen if Rosemary's baby belonged to Patty Hearst? An absolute blast (in more ways than one). I tore through this devilishly delightful, razor-sharp treat and enjoyed every minute."
--Jennifer Thorne, author of Diavola

"Enthralling, terrifying and endlessly surprising."
--M. R. Carey, author of The Girl with all the Gifts

"Sharp, bleak, funny, and disturbingly prescient, The Captive is a pitch-black blast of evil unpredictable fun."
--Justin Taylor, author of Reboot

"[A] witty supernatural thrill ride . . . Burgoyne keeps the action brisk and the repartee sharp in the ensuing game of cat-and-mouse . . . This refreshingly modern spin on the infernal child theme deserves to stand beside such genre classics as Rosemary's Baby and The Omen."
--Publishers Weekly

"The Captive is a dark yet affecting novel of both intense horror and high drama."
--Manhattan Book Review
"The Captive is exactly the offal-plastered zinger I was desperate for it to be. Humorous and absurd--almost theatrically so, but weighted enough with grim reality to keep the laughter jagged in your throat--The Captive is both a riot and a reckoning."
--FanFiAddict

"Ultimately, Kit Burgoyne's The Captive is not simply another clever, tense thriller; it plunges headlong into fanaticism, power, and that uneasy place where you begin to question if the good men and the evil guys are actually all that different . . . Thought-provoking."
--Bestsellers World

"Rosemary's Baby, but make it Patty Hearst! Come for the set-up, stay for the garden party. You'll know it when you see it."
--CrimeReads

Praise for the author's novels published as Ned Beauman

"Wonderfully outlandish."
--The New York Times

"Wildly inventive."
--Entertainment Weekly

"Gobsmackingly clever."
--Vanity Fair

"Uproarious."
--The New Yorker

"Endlessly witty and furiously inventive."
--The Washington Post

"One of the foremost satirists of his generation."
--The Times (UK)

About the Author

Kit Burgoyne is the horror fiction pen name of Ned Beauman, who was named one of Granta's Twenty Best Young British Novelists in 2013, and is the author of Boxer, Beetle (winner of the Goldberg Prize for Outstanding Debut Fiction); The Teleportation Accident (longlisted for the Man Booker Prize and winner of the Somerset Maugham Award); Glow; Madness Is Better than Defeat; and Venomous Lumpsucker (winner of the Arthur C. Clarke Award). He has written for The New York Times, The Guardian, and the London Review of Books. He lives in London. The Captive is his first novel as Kit Burgoyne.