Little Sister Death - Tapa dura

'What comes to mind when reading this novel - chilling, beautiful, quietly shocking - is The Shining ... This is a scary story but also an intellectual study of evil, its purpose and its effect. It is also a study of the writer - his temperament, his torment and his devil's pact for the price of a good story.' (Arifa Akbar Independent)

'Gay's terrifying ghost story is a new take on an old tale as the protagonist finds his family falling apart in a haunted farmstead.' (Sarah Hughes Observer)

A beautifully written, deeply unsettling haunted house story that lingers with the power of a half-remembered nightmare. (JOHN CONNOLLY)

Gay poetically shades together past and present in a novel that eschews outright sensationalism for something much more clever and creepy. (Claire Allfree Metro)

Just in time for Halloween comes a superbly unsettling 'lost' horror novel from US writer William Gay, who died in 2012. Inspired by Tennessee's Bell Witch hauntings, this jumps back and forth in time from 1785 to 1982 in a kind of Cormac McCarthy - meets - Stephen King-meets-Blair Witch - sleep destroying way. (Howard Calvert SHORTLIST)

The book's brevity only adds to the sustained sense of dread, and it positively thrums with a dark, witchy power. Gay has a knack for quietly eerie imagery and his prose feels as ancient and evil as the barbarous acts that began this haunting. (Will Salmon SFX magazine)

'The way he injects creeping dread into the narrative is deft and skilled, with sinister sightings and sounds in the walls gradually accumulating ... the final restrained passages are chilling in the extreme, making it a highly accomplished and admirable read.' (Doug Johnstone Big Issue)

This ''lost'' horror novel from the late William Gay will fill you with dread from page one. (Isabelle Broom Heat)

'Gay - whose writing is often compared to the likes of William Faulkner and Cormac McCarthy - brilliantly captures the brutal, violent, short lives of the dirt poor and dispossessed in rural Tennessee years ago. A dark horror novel such as this sits easily in that landscape.' (Carla McKay Daily Mail)

William Gay's Little Sister Death is a dark, shimmering gift to readers. Marshaling all his monumental narrative powers and with prose as sharp and glittering as a scythe, he brings a tale so sinister, lush and spellbinding, it haunts your dreams long after you reach its final pages. (MEGAN ABBOTT)