Terminal Zones
Gareth E. Rees
‘Fresh and disturbing stories mapping out the pressure points in the psychedelic everyday - Rees consistently reaches the places others do not.’
– Will Wiles, author of Plume
‘Strange, compelling and brilliantly funny.’
– Prano Bailey-Bond, director of Censor
‘Gareth E Rees propels us into a vast and uncanny future; showing us brief snatches of a world to come. A poignant message delivered with guile, wit and beauty.’
– Matt Wesolowski, author of Demon
Ten tragicomic tales of environmental and personal disaster from the margins of town and country.
A troubled hipster is seduced by an electricity pylon.
Sinister omens manifest in a supermarket car park.
A motorway bridge becomes a father.
Malevolent bacteria plague a polar icebreaker.
A bioengineered abomination lurks in a Gloucestershire railway terminus
The weekly bin collection pushes a man over the edge.
A former squatter clings to her home on a crumbling cliff.
Joyriders are foiled by Anglo Saxon floodwaters.
Vampiric entities stalk B&Q.
And fiery catastrophe comes to the zoo.
Gareth E. Rees’s first collection of short fiction explores lives on the verge of breakdown, where ordinary people are driven to extremes by the effects of late capitalism and ecological collapse.
Praise for Gareth E. Rees and Terminal Zones
‘Perfect pocket material for your own excursions into forgotten and ignored spaces. Take it with you as you explore towpaths, lay-bys, the far edges of retail parks, and those places whose DO NOT ENTER signs have long faded from oppressive sunlight and relentless rain…’
– Starburst
‘All of the usual Gareth Rees tropes are here: motorways, pylons, car parks, retail parks and abandoned industrial sites. The thing that is new, that is experimental, is the range of characters Rees creates, a whole world of them. Some are more fully realised than others but they people his nightmares and, as a collective, they are the driving force behind these stories.’
– Psychogeographic Review
‘I thoroughly enjoyed these unsettling, darkly funny tales of people and places at the margins of society. Terminal Zones is an outstanding collection that firmly establishes Gareth E. Rees as one of Britain’s foremost chroniclers of lives lived between the cracks.’
– Tim Major, author of Hope Island
‘What he seeks out is the magical in the mundane, the bizarre happenings in plain sight.’
– The Times
'Rees is a writer of deep seriousness and political commitment with an urgent message.'
– Literary Review
'An aspiring social anthropologist with a poetic streak.'
– Times Literary Supplement
About the author
Gareth E. Rees is a writer of fiction and non-fiction, based in Hastings, East Sussex. He’s the founder of the website, Unofficial Britain (www.unofficialbritain.com) and the author of Unofficial Britain (Elliott & Thompson, 2020) Car Park Life (Influx Press 2019), The Stone Tide (Influx Press, 2018) and Marshland (Influx Press, 2013). He has also contributed short stories to numerous anthologies of weird fiction and horror.
Paperback ISBN: 9781914391132
Ebook ISBN: 9781914391149
Publication date: October 2022
Formats: Paperback / eBook