The Captive

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.

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.