High John the Conqueror, Tariq Goddard
High John the Conqueror, Tariq Goddard
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High John the Conqueror

Author: Tariq Goddard

Narrator: Tariq Goddard

Unabridged: 11 hr 2 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Repeater

Published: 11/08/2022

Synopsis

"I always wanted to be a writer, but I became a policeman instead."

WESSEX, 2016. Teenagers are vanishing off the council estates of a small provincial city. A crop of herbs that are said to posses magical powers which only grow once every fifty years are found in the woods. A supernatural creature believed to be the guardian of the herbs is seen in nightmares. Rumours of orgiastic rituals on the estates of the rich and powerful excite the curious. And the Queen of England decides to celebrate her 90th birthday with a visit to the city’s famous cathedral spire. 

Into this madness, two ambitious detectives, one with doomed literary ambitions, seek to solve the mystery, their only lead that “posh people are taking our children”.

Blending mysticism, class war, societal malfeasance and transcendence, High John The Conqueror identifies the point in our recent history when the ghosts of our past become the political monsters of the present.

About The Author

Tariq Goddard was born in London in 1975. He read Philosophy at King's College London. His first three novels were short listed for various awards including Whitbread (Costa) First Novel Award, Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize and the Commonwealth Writer’s Prize. His fourth and fifth books won the Independent Publishers Gold medal for Horror Writing and Silver medal for Literary Fiction respectively. He lives on a farm in Wiltshire with his wife and children.

Reviews

Goodreads review by Catalina on October 22, 2022

In my view High John the Conqueror is a satire. It pokes fun both at the police procedural novel and at the real police. Expect the usual corruption both at police level but also at high levels; people that could be classed as white trash(excuse my political incorrectness), drugs and layers upon lay......more

Goodreads review by J.K. on January 29, 2024

I love the idea of fusing a detective story with folk horror and largely enjoyed this book. Some sections, such as the descriptions of the housing estates, were very compelling, and I thought the dialogue captured the social milieu quite well. The central mystery was oddly underdeveloped, however, a......more

Goodreads review by Jake on February 28, 2024

I don’t know who I would recommend this book to at all but I know that person wouldn’t have otherwise been me. There’s a lot going on with this book: mystery, folk horror, urban wyrd (which is apparently an English subgenere), as well as running commentaries on police brutality and gentrification. I’......more

Goodreads review by Stevedutch on November 22, 2022

Where to start with this tedious nonsense? Well, I suppose a summary of the plot might be a good place. In a rundown housing estate in a ‘typical’ small town in southern England young people are going missing and the local police decide it’s time to investigate. This provides an opportunity, not onl......more

Goodreads review by Shaina on November 04, 2022

Thank you so much to NetGalley and Tariq Goddard for providing me with a complimentary digital ARC for High John the Conqueror coming out November 8, 2022. The honest opinions expressed in this review are my own. It’s 2016 in Wessex and teens are disappearing from the council estates of a small prov......more

Quotes

"Deranged police procedural meets darkly comic folk horror in Wild Wild Wessex. Utterly mesmerising." - Jake Arnott, author of the The Long Firm and The Fatal Tree

"It's going to be every outsider's beach read, a doorway into the future." - Mark Stewart, the Pop Group

"Enchanting. Goddard here comes into his own as the Gris-Gris man of English fiction." - Patrick Wright

"Here, as in all of Tariq Goddard’s fiction, the ordinary and the uncanny, the mundane and the metaphysical—above all, the sardonic and the profound—merge with one another in some mysterious borderland that he alone seems to have explored. And High John the Conqueror may be his most entertaining novel yet." - David Bentley Hart

"A masterwork of the uncanny. A trip into fresh, bizarre, thrilling new territory. Reading it is almost a hallucinatory experience—it takes daring swerves away from what we call reality, but stays close enough to life to get under your skin. By the end you'll be altered on a cellular level, questioning what you thought you knew." - Elvia Wilk, author of Oval: A Novel

"A wyrd & eerie tale for wyrd & eerie times, High John the Conqueror is, like High John de Conqueror itself, 'a genuine hybrid and a one-off,' crafting & grafting police noir, folk horror and occult parapolitics into an altered States of the Nation novel of monsters past and present. PD James meets MR James!" - David Peace

"This book is brilliant and crackles with wit, invention and insight." - John Doran, The Quietus

"Hallucinatory yet gritty, Goddard’s novel is a genuine portrait of Britain’s shadowy underworld but intensified to a psychogenic peak." - Andy Paciorek, Folk Horror Revival

"High John the Conqueror is that rare thing, a brilliantly shrewd page-turner. I couldn't recommend it highly enough as, what-the-hell, a holiday read." - Matthew Ingram

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