Edmonville

An ordinary town full of ordinary citizens going about their everyday business.

Then the earth tremor hits. Glass shatters, concrete crumbles, buildings fracture and collapse as everything disappears beneath choking clouds of dust.

The few shell-shocked survivors emerge to be met with a terrifying, impossible sight. Most of Edmonville has disappeared into an enormous crevasse; the semi-demolished buildings which remain are perched or a series of peaks, crags and pillars of stone - many of them separated from each other by hundreds of feet, and a perilous, bottomless gulf below.

Without electricity, heating or water, the few remaining citizens of Edmonville wait for rescue - which doesn't come. As starvation threatens, the best and the worst of human nature come to the fore in the struggle for survival. Their only hope lies in their being able to make contact with one another.

Then, one by one, people start to disappear without trace ...

What exactly has happened to Edmonville? And who - or what - lurks in the hideous Chasm below? The macabre imaginative genius of Stephen Laws is at its best in this phenomenal tale of an ordinary town caught up in extraordinary circumstances.

RAMSEY CAMPBELL An exhilirating mixture of gruesomeness and visionary terror with Stephen Laws' special touch of humanity - a tale not just compelling and suspenseful but ultimately moving

The Crystal Queen has a little chat with Stephen Laws about Chasm...

Stephen Laws takes the research aspects of his work very seriously, believing that to produce a really effective supernatural horror-thriller, the down-to-earth everyday aspects of a novel should be rock solid to give the supernatural "intrusion" greater effect. In the past, this research has led him into some interesting situations; climbing an elevator shaft on a maintenance inspection for Darkfall, scuba-diving (and nearly drowning) in a Stockport canal for Macabre, behind the wheel of a runaway bulldozer for Daemonic. For Chasm, in which an English town is devastated by an earthquake, Steve was actually allowed to participate in the destruction of a town centre! The demolition experts Bradley Hall and Scotdem were only too pleased to give Steve as much information as he needed, even bringing him in for the actual demolition work itself.

"Chasm is my tenth novel," says Steve. "As such, I wanted it to be my 'block-buster'. It's actually been about two years in creation, and has given me a chance to pull all the stops out, with guest appearances by The Four Horsemen of The Apocalypse; The Cherubim (nasty little naked angels with sharp teeth who hunt in packs and can tear you to pieces in seconds); an army of the living dead; a feral tribe of homicidal, cannibalistic survivors bent on the destruction of anyone over the age of sixteen, and The Vorla: a living, crawling black sea composed of everything evil that mankind has ever experienced. And to add to the fun, I even got to blow up a shopping centre in person!... all for research purposes and all in the name of art!"