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Kim Newman
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Jago Kindle Edition

by Kim Newman (Author) Format: Kindle Edition
3.9 3.9 out of 5 stars 42 ratings
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The residents of a sleepy English village are dreaming—and their nightmares are turning into realities—in this “brilliantly nasty” horror novel from the Bram Stoker Award-winning author of Anno Dracula (Sunday Telegraph)
 
Paul, a young academic composing a thesis about the end of the world, and his girlfriend have come to the tiny English village of Alder for the summer. Their idea of a rural retreat gradually sours as the laws of nature begin to break down around them . . . 

It would appear that the annual rock music festival held by the bizarre Agapemone sect is the only thing shattering the peace of Alder. But as the temperature rises, it becomes clear that the tiny village may not be the Heaven on Earth that their leader, Reverend Anthony Jago, is trying to create. Residents’ nightmares are coming true—unleashing creatures from local legend, science fiction, and the dark side of the human mind upon the town.
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  1. Print length
    512 pages
  2. Language
    English
  3. Sticky notes
    On Kindle Scribe
  4. Publisher
    Titan Books
  5. Publication date
    March 19, 2013
  6. File size
    1772 KB
  7. Page Flip
    Enabled
  8. Word Wise
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  9. Enhanced typesetting
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Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Though this latest horror novel from the author of The Night Mayor draws on conventional elements of the genre, it is a distinguished literary effort rooted in the emotional interiors of three-dimensional characters. Anthony Jago, a former priest with powerful psychic abilities, has set up a religious cult house in the small British town of Alder, the site of an annual Woodstock-style rock festival that attracts members of many different countercultural groups. As the festival opens, Jago's powers turn evil; he is able to raid peoples' minds and hearts and bring their desperate fantasies to life--fantasies that conjure up creatures ranging from evil dwarves to a murdered biker's ghost to a Martian invasion. As Jago begins to recreate the Book of Revelations in Alder, the only hope for the town, and perhaps the world, is Susan Ames, a psychical agent of the British secret service, who has infiltrated Jago's organization. Newman's prose is sophisticated and his narrative drive irresistible. The realistically blase way characters accustomed to the rapidly changing contemporary world react to the sudden appearances of horrors and monstrosities, and the manner in which the supernatural is depicted--as if ghouls and goblins were no less likely than a nuclear bomb or a toxic waste dump--are only two of this fine novel's many strengths.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal

In the English village of Alder, Anthony Jago has set up a religious community called the Agapemone, the "Abode of Love." The residents of Alder for the most part ignore the hippielike, beatifically smiling cultists and the fact that their own young people are being drawn into Jago's influence. However, the Agapemone's yearly rock music festival is nearing and the village is divided: some like the revenue brought in by the concertgoers, while others resent the rowdy hordes. Two researchers infiltrate the commune and discover that Jago, a priest defrocked for sexual misconduct, believes he is the second coming of Jesus and that any who are not the Beloved's Chosen are enemies to be destroyed. As concertgoers pour into Alder, the combination of music, summer heat, and tensions spark a mad culmination of Jago's inhumanly powerful delusions in a riot of visions that threatens to engulf the entire village. By the author of The Night Mayor (Carroll & Graf, 1992) and Bad Dreams (Carroll & Craf, 1991), this novel is recommended for general collections.
- A.M.B. Amantia, Population Crisis Committee Lib., Washington, D.C.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Product details

  • ASIN ‏ : ‎ B009QJMEVO
  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ Titan Books; Reprint edition (March 19, 2013)
  • Publication date ‏ : ‎ March 19, 2013
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • File size ‏ : ‎ 1772 KB
  • Text-to-Speech ‏ : ‎ Enabled
  • Screen Reader ‏ : ‎ Supported
  • Enhanced typesetting ‏ : ‎ Enabled
  • X-Ray ‏ : ‎ Not Enabled
  • Word Wise ‏ : ‎ Enabled
  • Sticky notes ‏ : ‎ On Kindle Scribe
  • Print length ‏ : ‎ 512 pages
  • Customer Reviews:
    3.9 3.9 out of 5 stars 42 ratings

About the author

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Kim Newman

Kim Newman

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Kim Newman is a London-based author and movie critic. With over 25 years of experience, he writes regularly for Empire Magazine and contributes to The Guardian, The Times, Sight & Sound and others. He makes frequent appearances on radio and TV and has popular lines in horror. He has won the Bram Stoker, International Horror Guild, British Fantasy and British Science Fiction Awards and been nominated for the Hugo and World Fantasy Award.

Customer reviews

3.9 out of 5 stars
3.9 out of 5
42 global ratings

Top reviews from the United States

Arjubilee
5.0 out of 5 stars Very excellent work
Reviewed in the United States on October 5, 2013
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Very interesting book, so far very gripping, like most of her work. She has a stunning skill with visual description.
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1.0 out of 5 stars Pure dragging piece of s***
Reviewed in the United States on October 14, 2013
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I finished this book out of pure stubbornness, it is kind of amazing that this same author wrote the Anno Dracula series. From the bottom of my heart, if I never read, hear or write the words beloved, we share love and so on, again it will be too soon. This book is the worst one I have read in the last two years, and I read a lot. I would advise fellow readers to keep clear of this book, don't waste your money or something even more valuable, your time.
9 people found this helpful
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Zatoichi 007
5.0 out of 5 stars A challenging work of dark genius
Reviewed in the United States on November 2, 2016
This is an excellent slice of of graphic, yet uniquely British horror, served up with real literary style. There are truly some horrific images lurking within this densely plotted and complex narrative. Those with patience will be richly rewarded. This is not your everyday brand of streamlined pedestrian horror. Highly recommended to those who savor something very different and challenging.
3 people found this helpful
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1.0 out of 5 stars Boing Boing lied to me
Reviewed in the United States on October 26, 2013
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Boing Boing told me this was a great book, they were wrong. I've had this book in my Kindle app for months. I had to force myself to finish it, mainly due to my OCD. If I don't finish a book I start something horrible happens somewhere in the world and it's all my fault. While reading this book I contemplated just letting that horrible event occur.
11 people found this helpful
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Top reviews from other countries

Bonnie
5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent Bonus Stories
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on October 7, 2016
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The main novel, Jago, has the classic grimy feeling and disturbingly real characters that are typical of Newman's writing, but much less humour than you usually find in his books. It also makes some perspicacious but uncomfortable points about human nature and reality. All in all, it's very good, exciting and frightening, but less fun than his other works.

The short stories included at the end, however, are a wonderful reward. The characters of Jago are translated into other settings of vast originality and sweep you along through the nearly-familiar world with frequent bursts of laugh-embarrassingly-loud wit. They have the feeling of old fashioned adventure stories laced with a lot of dry, black observational comedy and it all works perfectly. Honestly, the three bonus short stories are worth the price, even without the novel.
One person found this helpful
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J Foreman
4.0 out of 5 stars The best Somerset-set horror I've read in decades
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on May 1, 2013
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It's not often that a novel is set in Somerset, with its yokels talking in softly burred accents, and it's less frequent that those novels are apocalyptic page turners. Newman, one of Empire magazine's film critics, took every bad horror movie he could think of and lumped them into Jago. And then he went further, including the Green Man (if you're scared of Morris dancers or forests, that will make it much, much worse for you), the War of the Worlds, children's sick jokes, and much more.

There's few things that made an impression on me the first time round; there was the farmer rutting with the soil of his farm. A sentence like "Farmer Maskell fertilised his fields" tends to stick with you, if you're a teenage boy. Most of the other sexual references (and there's a few, this being a more respectable version of a lurid Shaun Hutson horror) passed me by when I was younger, or I just blotted them out. I'd completely forgotten about the pub full of sick jokes (which is something I remember Will Self doing similar things with in The Quantity Theory Of Insanity), I'd never encountered the Ramones so I wouldn't understand the `gabba gabba' references and somehow I'd forgotten all the religious imagery. The F***ing Hell feels reminiscient of Slither, which appeared in cinemas about 15 years later, but I suppose the collapse of flesh into monstrosity predates that, with films like Society and much more besides.

I suppose it would be surprising if I hadn't forgotten something; Jago is a hefty wodge of a book, and although some things will stick with each reader (the Moebius strip of a plot is probably one of them) there will be details you forget, or just miss in the first place.

With twenty more years of reading horror, it's nice to appreciate some of what Newman was doing. Just like a one-man Cthulhu Mythos machine, he was intertwining the vampire stories and their protagonists, with some of his Somerset Wild West material, with any film he could think of, into a clever (and it knows it's clever, almost irritatingly so) mesh of storylines. Some of the harsher stuff, like the Farmer Maskell subplot, with its body horror, is a bit hard to take, and some bits link together almost too neatly for satisfaction, but the overarching premise, that truth is only visible by pain, is sustained well throughout, and even at the end I was still startled by some of the events. It's nice to read a book where everyone hurts, and the author may care for his characters but isn't scared about killing them when necessary.

I think The Quorum is more enjoyable, and the Anno Dracula sequence more commercially viable, but if you wanted a literary equivalent of a lurid 80s Euro-horror, this would be right up there.
4 people found this helpful
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Rowena Hoseason
3.0 out of 5 stars A throwback to old-skool horror stories
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on October 29, 2014
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It took a long time for me to trudge through this English country horror story, a tale of cult possessions and a kind of alternate Glastonbury festival which feels a lot like Hotel California: you can check out any time you like, but you can never leave...
Jago was written back in the early 1990s before Newman's success with the AD series. It certainly feels like an early novel and doesn't have the polish and drive of his more recent stories, nor much of the acerbic wit or sharp-eyed satire. Instead it feels more like a lumbering old James Herbert horror-mystery -- nothing wrong in that, but it's a far cry from the captivating world of the Diogenes Club.
There are moments of eye-opening excellence; some genuinely shocking sequences and some wonderfully weird inventions. But perhaps Jago wasa bit too ambitious in trying to weave together so many different perspectives and themes: Newman more than pulls it off in later books, but here I got bogged down in some of the rambling narrative. I'm almost surprised they didn't take a severe set of editorial scissors to it for the new edition: it always hurts to leave some of the action on the cutting room floor but it would've been a better book for it.
An old-fashioned door-stopping monster of a book. Best read on holiday, over several days, when you have time and inclination to do little else.
7/10
2 people found this helpful
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Ian Warborn
5.0 out of 5 stars Five Stars
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on March 21, 2015
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This book really gave me the creeps, equally sickened and entranced.
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JK
4.0 out of 5 stars Psychedelic horror breaks out in the West Country.
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on July 6, 2015
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Jago was originally published in 1991 and comes under the heading of 'speculative fiction' which is just about perfect; this is one of the strangest novels I've read. The plot flits between supernatural, science fiction, fantasy, religion, superstition, Armageddon and folklore with a dollop of horror just to round things off and it's a long, long read at 500+ pages on Kindle.

For the first 200+ pages Newman takes his time to build the world into which you're about to be thrown. The scene setting throughout the book is exceptional and one of it's strengths. In this case we're transported to the small village of Alder in the West Country where there's soon to be a festival of huge proportion, similar to Woodstock, and the population of Alder is invaded by a sea of visitors.

In the middle of this sea of life stands cult leader, former priest, Anthony Jago who suddenly turns to the dark side and begins using his supernatural powers to create mayhem and misery.

The world begins to break down around the festival goers and the villagers. What's real and what's not?. Horror comes at them in weird forms and from many different directions but much of that horror has been dredged up from inside themselves and manifests itself in weird, bizarre behaviour and 'acting out'.

I enjoyed that Armageddon in this instance might be caused more by the toxic nature of people than toxic chemicals. That was clever. Be aware there is some strong imagery and this writer is not afraid to go over the top but; take it all with a pinch of salt because he also throws a lot of disturbingly comic moments into the mix to break things up.

Will the world be saved?. Well; there are some good guys here as well as bad guys but I'm going to leave you to read the book to find out what happens.Expect the unexpected on every level.

Jago reads like 1970/1980s horror the time when authors didn't make sense of what they wrote because horror and supernatural fiction could be oddly psychedelic. Think Ray Bradbury, Graham Masterton or early James Herbert. It's true to say Kim Newman ramped things up with Jago.

Completely disturbingly and in parts superbly good.
2 people found this helpful
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