The Devil's Footprints

by John Burnside

Michael Gardiner has lived in Coldhaven all his life yet still feels like an outsider. Married but rather distant from his wife, he reads in the local paper that a school friend, Moira Birnie, has killed herself and her two sons by setting their car on fire; but she has spared her 14-year-old daughter Hazel. Michael uneasily recalls his past connections to Moira. As teenagers, Michael and Moira had a brief romance, yet more troubling to Michael is the fact that he was responsible for the death of Moira’s brother, the town bully. In the wake of the tragedy, Michael becomes obsessed with Hazel, who is just old enough to be his daughter. Aware of his obsession, Hazel convinces Michael to take her away from the village and her father, an abusive and violent man.

Setting his story against the untamed Scottish landscape, John Burnside has written a chilling novel that explores the elemental forces of everyday life: love, fear, grief, and the hope of redemption. In its ability to evoke and exploit our most primal fears, The Devil’s Footprints prompts comparisons to the best of Stephen King. In both language and imagery, it is a novel of mysterious beauty, written with the clarity and power of a folktale.

(From Publisher).

John Burnside has published in the UK five works of fiction and eleven collections of poetry, including The Asylum Dance, which won the 2000 Whitbread Poetry Award, and The Light Trap, which was short-listed for the 2002 T.S. Eliot Prize. His memoir, A Lie About My Father, was published in 2006 in the UK to enormous critical acclaim

This story encapsulates a village life of things seen and unseen and is told with great effect through John's poetic eye for detail and economy. John Burnside is a writer due wider acclaim.