The Feast

If yours is an appetite for the sinister and the bizarre then you’d best take a place at The Feast. This collection of stories from acclaimed author of the uncanny Matthew G. Rees may well have you calling for more.

The writer of Keyhole and Smoke House & Other Stories returns with a book of new tales that some think to be deliciously dark.

The connective tissue of these contemporary-set stories is their interest in food, meals and ingredients, sometimes in a direct way, sometimes in a more glancing fashion.

Among them the quest of a big-city chef for a secret ingredient and the startling discovery he makes in an unsettling small town... the chance reunion of a restaurant critic and a cook whose food he once reviewed... the bizarre triangle of an old and rich widow, her scheming suitor and a truly peculiar fish... the strange food hoarded by the citizens of a mysterious, mist-shrouded university town… the sedate village where newcomers circulate vegetables that seem to one resident to have something sinister about them... the creepy hill-farm whose mean-spirited owner makes a death-bed pledge of one last - and very weird - supper... the veteran judge whose insatiable appetite brings an awful new meaning to the term ‘body of law’... plus the restaurant whose patrons may themselves be on the menu... and the extraordinary dining challenge that a legendary trencherwoman must digest in what threatens to be her final feast.

These are just a few of the stories from a writer whose previous fiction has been compared with Robert Aickman, M.R. James, Ramsey Campbell and Arthur Machen. Past stories by Rees in his collection Keyhole have also been tipped to appeal to readers of the writing of Nina Allan, Rhys Hughes and the late Joel Lane.

Rees has been described as possessing the gift of being able to present the apparently innocent in a threatening and menacing light - his fiction at times operating in a speculative borderland whose features are familiar yet whose people and places stand somehow askew to the world that we know.

With stories set in England, Wales, the USA, France, Italy, Bavaria and elsewhere, this collection has an international flavour.

The twenty-two fictions (74,000 words in total) have a literary style but are written in a readable and accessible way. Vivid description, compelling characters, unforeseen turns and dark - at times laugh-out-loud - humour have been said to be features of Rees’s work. He has also been described as a writer unafraid to explore the human psyche and prepared to peer into dark places. His tales have been said to linger in the memory.

Roald Dahl and Walter de la Mare are two writers with whom Rees thinks he has some similarities in style at times.

Other stories in this collection include the tale of a fisherman washed ashore on an isolated islet occupied by a fabled order of monks... the fatal ingredient that lurks in a cold, snow-filled forest... a high-powered businesswoman and a horribly selfish shellfish... a visit to a tearoom that takes an unexpected turn... a trip to a lonely country inn whose landlord seems to have a distinctly unconventional view of customer service... the macabre course of a husband-and-wife’s anniversary dinner... an exotic dancer and what might be a recipe for securing more than a slice of the multi-million dollar fortune of an old, skinflint farmer of peaches in the storm-hit American South.

The stories appear exclusively in this volume.