Leytonstone

A novella.

One evening in 1906 a chubby little boy of seven, son of a London greengrocer, is taken by his father to visit the local police station.

There he suddenly finds himself, inexplicably, locked up for a crime he hasn’t committed – or has he? Blinking into sunlight, traumatized by his overnight stay, he is told by his father the next morning: “Now you know what happens to naughty little boys!” But the incident is the catalyst for a series of events that will scar, and create, the world’s leading Master of Terror in the century to come...

*

The boy is Alfred Hitchcock.

The story is the gripping and evocative new novella by Stephen Volk, writer of the highly-acclaimed novella Whitstable – which featured Peter Cushing as its central character and was published in 2013 (also by Spectral Press) to coincide with the centenary of the great actor’s death.

Leytonstone – like Whitstable – elevates fact (in this case an anecdote the famous director told repeatedly throughout his life) into resonant and poignant fiction, lifting the veil on not only the innocent and troubled young “Fred” but his emotionally needy mother and a father constantly struggling to do the right thing. But what none of them knows is that, after that fateful night and its consequences, their lives will be changed forever...

*

As a screenwriter used to creating fear and terror for such directors as William Friedkin and Ken Russell, Stephen Volk has long been fascinated by both Hitchcock’s films and Hitchcock the man. “I wanted to explore what makes a person want to frighten others for a living,” he says. “But I’m all too aware that Hitch was a mass of contradictions, and any absolute ‘truth’ is an elusive beast, as notable recent films have proven. This is my Hitchcock – a scared little boy.”

Whitstable and Leytonstone are parts one and two of Volk’s putative series of thematically related but separate fictions, to be called The Dark Masters Trilogy.