"A mind-bending, supernatural crime novel uncovering the past and present of a Jack-the-Ripper-like serial killer and the mysterious groups fighting the hero’s time travelling powers"
This time-looping supernatural crime novel is unique and mind-bending (perhaps sometimes to the point where I got pretty lost in what was happening, but I’m not always great at following thrillers even when they’re only operating in linear time!) Our hero is trying to find his recently-deceased sister’s PHD thesis, a manuscript which promises to change the study of history forever – and using his newly discovered ability to see the past to follow clues that she left him – which takes him through a tour of a town obsessed by a ‘Jack-theRipper’-like serial killer, and the women he murdered, uncovering a cult-like church who seem to have a connection to the hero’s new ghostly powers. I was really interested in the way the writer has, by my interpretation anyway, created a world in which someone’s OCD is their gateway into a superpower of being able to open up time portals. Our hero can see ‘loops’, ghostly re-enactments of past events, by feeling intuitively that, for example, lining up a shoe perfectly perpendicular to a certain wall, or holding his breath for a certain length, will connect him to his now-dead sister.
Set in contemporary Cardiff, this diverse, pacey, high-concept time-warp crime novella explores themes of violence, ritual and alternative realities, while it seeks to honour the victims of serial killers and challenge the way that some have become part of the tourism industry.
João Morais is from Cardiff and has Portuguese heritage on his father's side of the family who hail from Cabo Verde. He’s recently completed a PhD in Creative Writing at Cardiff University. He was a prize-winner in the New Welsh Writing Awards 2021 Rheidol Prize for Prose with a Welsh Theme or Setting, and has been shortlisted for the Academi Rhys Davies Short Story Prize, the Percy French Prize for Comic Verse and the All Wales Comic Verse Award. He won the 2013 Terry Hetherington Prize for Young Writers, and has been selected twice for a Hay Festival’s Writers at Work residency. His work has appeared in magazines and anthologies including New Welsh Reader, Roundyhouse, Popshot, The Ghastling, Cheval and Rarebit (Parthian) and New Welsh Short Stories (Seren). His short story collection, Things That Make The Heart Beat Faster, was published by Parthian in 2018.
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