The Unnoticeables

Carey is a punk in New York in 1977. He wants cheap beer and the odd fight, and he would happily ignore the rumours about tar in the sewers and about unkillable people showing up at gigs. Then his friends start disappearing, and he finds he cannot describe the faces of the kids who took them.

Thirty-six years later, Kaitlyn has moved to Los Angeles to work as a stunt double, and her career is not going well. Her week gets worse fast. A former teen idol, long past his peak, tries to eat her, her closest friend disappears, and a figure that calls itself an angel stands in the street outside her building.

The novel alternates between these two timelines, 1977 and 2013, and both face the same enemy. Certain entities either dissolve the people they choose or hollow them out into bodies that keep walking and keep feeding. No one in authority will help. The only people placed to push back are a drunk punk and an out-of-work stuntwoman.

This is horror with a comic streak, heavy on jokes and cruder than polite, and the humour sits on top of something considerably nastier than it first admits. It is the first book of the Vicious Circuit trilogy.