Description
On a bright spring day in England, six teenagers laugh and joke as they make their way to a neglected part of the institution they mockingly call Our Glorious School. Hidden in the dark hollow of a buttress is the door to a small, windowless cellar. Behind the door, the old stairs have rotted away. A boy unfurls a rope-ladder and five descend into The Hole. The remaining boy closes the cellar door, locks it from the outside, and walks calmly away.
The idea is simple. While their parents think they are on a field trip, and the school thinks they’re at home, Frankie, Geoff, Alex, Mike and Liz will spend three days locked in The Hole. Martyn will remain above ground, promising that when the five emerge into daylight, they’ll have been part of the greatest prank the infamous schemer has ever engineered: what he calls ‘an experiment with real life’.
The three days pass predictably enough: talking, some booze, flirting, a few friendly fights. At 5pm on the third day they drink a celebratory bottle of vodka and wait for the mastermind to arrive and release them.
Thirty hours later, they realise that Martyn is not coming to let them out… ever. The experiment has only just begun.
Taut, eerie and disturbing, After the Hole is a compelling novel of physical endurance, psychological survival, and shocking revelation, made all the more stunning by its last pages.
A scintillating debut… Burt’s will be a name to watch – Daily Mail
Compulsively sinister – The Times
A frighteningly good plot… expertly borrows the horror and tension that made William Golding’s Lord of the Flies such a success – Metronews
The suspense and claustrophobia become almost unbearable… a remarkable debut by any standards – Irish Independent
