The Captive by Kit Burgoyne review – a literary novelist tries his hand at pulp horror

As we meet Luke, a nervous footsoldier in a revolutionary cell, he is on the point of carrying out his first proper operation. He and his colleagues – veteran activist Cam, and fire-in-her-belly true believer Rosa – are about to kidnap Adeline Woolsaw, 23-year-old scion of an obscenely wealthy clan who run an outsourcing company called the Woolsaw Group.

The company’s parasitic, money-grabbing, cost-shaving, data-siphoning activities stand for everything that is sinister and wrong with the conjunction of capitalism and state power. But the problem its opponents have is that the Woolsaw Group’s activities are so far-reaching, and its public profile so blandly corporate, that the public can’t be persuaded to pay any attention to its wickedness: “it’s ‘the largest public service outsourcing company in the UK’, which is so boring your brain just switches off. Which is good for the Woolsaw Group.” The hope of our wee terror cell, essentially, is that kidnapping the Woolsaws’ daughter will wake people up by putting a human face on it.

The abduction goes well – Adeline is bundled into the back of a van in time-honoured fashion – except for two things. One is that her kidnappers quickly realise that their hostage is in the third trimester of pregnancy; the other is that it turns out she’s positively delighted to be removed from the bosom of her family, and doesn’t under any circumstances wish to be given back.

I hope it won’t be considered too spoilery of this very plot-driven novel to say that those two things are connected. Adeline’s parents aren’t evil in the mundane Capita or Serco way Luke had assumed, but in a praying-to-the-Old-Ones, black-altar-in-the-basement-and-blood-on-the-tits way. Adeline has been artificially inseminated with the seed of “The Long-Before” (sperm-collection process not specified but described as “complicated”), and is now the unwilling brood mother for your basic antichrist. He is born in captivity just a few hours after the kidnapping. His demonic nature is affirmed by the way that very yucky and inexplicable things (showers of hailstones like bullets, swarms of weird caterpillars) start happening in the infant’s vicinity as soon as he feels threatened. Adeline, pleasingly, calls him Percy – for the sole reason that it’s an absurd name to give an antichrist.

So the setup is something like Rosemary’s Baby by way of Raising Arizona. What follows gleefully chucks every old-school horror trope you care to think of at the wall. There are murderous henchmen, dark secrets, messages from the void and arcane rituals up to and including hepatomancy. Every chapter or two something unexpected and urgent happens. Faces peel off. People are burned alive. There’s lots and lots of blood: “The MOT testing guy is lying on his back, the signboard resting halfway across him. His face and hands look like raw meat. There is a long spike protruding from his eye socket.”

Ned Beauman, writing here as Kit Burgoyne, is a clever writer whose previous work has made free with genre conventions and who isn’t afraid to be funny. As well as getting on the Granta Best of Young British list and snagging a Booker longlisting for The Teleportation Accident, he won the Arthur C Clarke science fiction award for Venomous Lumpsucker. He well understands the pleasures of a good twisty story, and as Kit Burgoyne he has what is obviously an enormous amount of fun writing weightless 1970s-style pulp horror. There is a (slight) nod to the Serious Issues that the real-world equivalents of the Woolsaw Group create, costing lives as they cut costs, exercising unaccountable power, sucking on the teat of the state and buying up politicians, etc. There’s a flicker of interest, but not much more than a flicker, in the psychology of the protagonists: in Luke’s relationship with Rosa, his feelings for Adeline, Cam’s activism, the Woolsaws’ marriage.

But, quite properly, sociopolitical commentary and subtlety of characterisation are not Beauman/Burgoyne’s priorities. He is, as I say, having fun – and the reader of this accomplished and super-readable romp has fun too.