The Beekeepers

What neglected powers lie behind the small phobias and fetishes, the minor perversities and self-inflicted accidents of ordinary life? Guy and Matthew decide to find out. For Matthew, however, it is a serious and urgent matter. He is an alcoholic, and has just had an appalling attack of the DTs. His family doctor severely warns him, but he is also given extraordinarily helpful advice by a more sinister doctor: 'think of bees'.

The two friends decide to help each other give up drink - by occult means. They will try to relinquish the ecstasies of drink and replace them with the visions of dowsing and spiritualism. It turns out that alcohol was a defence against deeper powers. Both men become superb dowsers, attracting swarming natural forces which are almost too strong for them. Both receive automatic writing from a murderous disemmbodied spirit. New thresholds of personality are revealed, but there is the sinister Institute for Study, also interested in bees, which is waiting to take advantage of these developments. Guy's wife Millie, a detached observer, is drawn closer and closer to the centre of these strange and terrible events.

'The Beekeepers' is an investigation of the magic and meaning of imagination. In it Peter Redgrove explores those forces which many consider to be 'occult' but which he believes to be natural forces concealed from our use by convention and timidity. The book also has an introduction by Peter Ackroyd.

'Redgrove has written one of his most hilarious and unsettling books yet.' (The Guardian)

'The Beekeepers' is filled with violence, madness, ghosts. And yet Redgrove's writing is powerful enough to make these spirits live, and The Beekeepers remains throughout an intriguing book.' (The Sunday Times)

Peter Redgrove (1932-2003) worked in several interlinked fields: as a poet, novelist, playwright, and in psychological practice. He believed creative, psychological and scientific work are aspects of the same common study, and his insights are profound, illuminating and constantly exciting. He received many awards during his life and was especially honoured by receiving the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry in 1996.