Review
'webs of Pinteresque paranoia ... Effectively horrid' Sunday Telegraph.
'A mix of psychological thriller and SF fable, this strange, wonderfully claustrophobic novel' The Guardian.
'a rich and gripping mix of all the ingredients that make for a truly haunting atmosphere' Writers' Hub.
'Terrin wastes no time sucking the audience into the narrative ... you simply won't want to put the book down until you find out exactly what's going on' Starburst Magazine.
'There's a cold and beautiful precision to Peter Terrin's writing, and a remorselessness and finally terrifying accretion of detail that begins by seeming fussy and ends by being unsettling' SFX.
'The Guard is so good, its world so minutely described and Michel so undeniably compelling that to suggest anything other than to pick this up and read it immediately would be to do it a disservice' SciFi Now.
'a tremendous novel, often horrifically funny and always unsettling' Irish Times.
'This masterly surrealist study of contemporary society, by a Flemish original, is worthy of the great JG Ballard' Irish Times.
From the Inside Flap
Harry and Michel live in the basement of a luxury apartment block, guarding its residents. Over the course of a weekend, the residents leave the block one by one - all apart from a man on floor 29. In the grey, airless monotony of the basement, Harry and Michel stick to their posts. The world might be at war or plunged into nuclear winter; they may be the last inhabitants in the city. All they know is that if they are vigilant, 'the organization' will reward them: promotion to an elite cadre of security officers remains their shining goal, and their days are punctuated by vivid dreams of everything they are missing. But what if there were no-one left to guard? And if the promised third officer arrives, how would he fit into Michel and Harry's studied routine of boredom and paranoia? Playing on our darkest fears, and with a creeping accumulation of horrifying detail, The Guard is a tautly observed novel by a writer of striking and stylish originality.
