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When widowed father Sam Michaels flees London with his daughters after a serial killer strikes terrifyingly close to home, Blackpool seems like the last place anyone would come looking for them. Neon lights, empty arcades and a grandmother with too many locked boxes should offer somewhere to hide. Instead, Liv finds herself drawn to a group of outsiders who belong to the town after dark.
As old fears follow the family north and something feral begins to stir beneath Blackpool’s glittering surface, Sam must protect his daughters from a danger he understands, while Liv discovers that the real threat may already be inside her.
"You can’t make the world smaller because you’re frightened of it."
Supernatural Horror, Psychological Terror,
CreatureHorror
Sam Michaels has spent six years trying to keep his daughters safe. When a brutal murder brings a notorious killer to their South London street, fear finally wins. He packs the car and drives north, seeking refuge with the estranged mother he barely knows.
But Blackpool offers its own dangers.
Beneath the neon, amusement arcades and rain-soaked promenade exists another town entirely, one Liv Michaels is increasingly drawn towards. New friendships promise the independence she has been fighting for, while strange sensations, missing hours and an escalating sense that something is changing leave her questioning how well she knows herself.
As Sam’s determination to protect his family begins to pull it apart, another threat is quietly closing the distance.
In a town built on bright lights, cheap thrills and things best left unseen after dark, some instincts cannot be outrun.
Target Market:
Neon Moon is aimed at readers of character-driven contemporary horror who like their supernatural fiction grounded in recognisable families, damaged relationships, bad decisions, and places that already feel haunted before anything impossible happens. It will appeal to readers who enjoy horror built around grief, parental fear, adolescence, bodily change, and the uncomfortable point where protection becomes control.
Ideal readers are drawn to British settings with a strong sense of place, particularly stories that find menace beneath faded seaside glamour, nightlife, arcades, cheap hotels, empty attractions, and communities existing just beyond the tourist version of a town. It should also appeal to readers who enjoy folklore and creature horror treated seriously, with transformation carrying emotional and psychological consequences rather than functioning purely as spectacle.
This is for readers who want the monster story and the family story to matter equally, and who understand that sometimes becoming something frightening can feel dangerously close to becoming free.
Comparable Titles:
Comparable in its treatment of transformation, identity, and belonging to Stephen Graham Jones’s Mongrels, Neon Moon uses supernatural change as much as a metaphor for family, class, and finding somewhere to belong as it does a source of physical horror.
It shares ground with Glen Duncan’s The Last Werewolf in treating lycanthropy as something bodily, intimate, and psychologically complicated rather than merely a creature-feature device, while Rachel Harrison’s Such Sharp Teeth offers a useful comparison for its collision of transformation, damaged relationships, anger, and unwanted personal reinvention.
Readers of Adam Nevill’s The Reddening and The Ritual should recognise the same interest in ancient impulses surviving beneath contemporary Britain, although Neon Moon moves that unease into a very different landscape of arcades, scooters, neon, council estates, seafront attractions, and rain-blackened streets.
There is also something of The Lost Boys and An American Werewolf in London in its mixture of youth culture, attraction, humour, violence, and the seductive possibility that becoming the monster might not initially feel like the worst thing that could happen.
Finally, if you have ever walked down Blackpool promenade after midnight, looked at the illuminations reflected in a puddle beside a discarded kebab, heard something howling somewhere beyond the dunes, and thought, ‘Yeah, this place absolutely has werewolves,’ this book may be for you.