First published in October of 2024, British author Graeme Reynolds’ novel ‘Night Bleeds Into Dawn’ formed the first book within what is presumed to be a potential series containing the character of Jack Carlton.
Jack Carlton could barely believe it when Margret Wells walked into his rundown office, requesting his professional help as a private detective. The woman was the very picture of sophistication and wealth. Someone who clearly wasn’t cut from the same cloth as Carlton.
The woman was offering to pay Carlton a substantial amount of cash to help prove her daughter’s innocence. Her seventeen-year-old daughter, Alice, was the sole survivor of the King’s College massacre.
When the police arrived at the private academy, they were confronted with an atrocious scene of human carnage. Four students had lost their lives that night, their mutilated bodies purposefully put on display in the college halls. Alice Wells was found covered in blood, lying beside the mutilated bodies, alive but in a catatonic state.
The girl had been in care since the incident. Too traumatised to speak and unresponsive to any treatment. The sole witness to what occurred at that Hertfordshire college, now too broken to utter a single word.
But all of a sudden, the police were saying Alice was responsible for enacting those brutal crimes. Somehow this small, teenaged girl had managed to savagely rip all those boys apart, hauling one of the bodies twenty feet in the air, to be impaled on a marble statue and hung their using the victim’s own intestines.
Jack Carlton knew there was no way the girl could have physically done what they were saying. Despite the horrific nature of the savage crimes, proving Alice’s innocence surely shouldn’t be too difficult. Or so Charlton had assumed.
However, the more he digs into the matter, the more disturbing things get. These privileged young students had been messing with things which no one should ever go near. They’d become caught up in a world of sadistic perversion and murder. Corrupted by an evil beyond comprehension. A nameless malevolence which had taken over their very souls.
Jack Carlton will soon find he is falling down a rabbit’s hole of inconceivable evil. Discovering that he is at the mercy of those at the very centre of this nightmare.
His investigations will take Charlton to the black heart of an ancient evil. A malevolence so despicable it has no name. And with each day that passes, its tendrils of corruption are spreading…
God damn do I miss James Herbert sometimes. The guy was a veritable powerhouse of tightly executed British horror. Novels which boasted bloody knees and red-raw palms from the sheer harshness of his gritty plots.
Sadly, Herbert is no longer with us. However, his legacy lives on in so many different ways. One of which is through novels of this incredible calibre. What British author, Graeme Reynolds, has achieved with this novel is absolutely breathtaking. It’s almost as if he’s enacted a dark ritual of his own, bringing Herbert back with the sole intention of having the legendry writer pen one final tale.
I kid you not, the comparisons I’m making here reach to the heights of veritable masters of the genre like Herbert. And that’s not in a rip-off copycat way, but rather it comes across as a respectful inspiration. In fact, the first half of the novel reads like a textbook Herbert offering, whilst the second half edging towards that of a Shaun Hutson piece – particularly along the lines of a Sean Doyle book.
The tale is focused upon one principal character in particular – Jack Carlton. The man’s the epitome of a gritty anti-hero. The sort of character you’d find knee-deep in the shit and mayhem in the majority James Herbert’s novels. Jack Carlton’s a financially struggling, divorced, and an alcoholic ex-cop turned private detective, with absolutely zero patience and a pretty short fuse. Yeah, this guy’s a heck of a lot of fun.
Carlton’s not alone in facing all of this occultist shitstorm. Holding up the rear we have his equally alcoholic brother-in-booze Chris Barnes (a character who was named after Reynolds’ audiobook narrator turned close friend, and not the dreadlocked ex-Cannibal Corpse vocalist!). This spit-and-sawdust Scottish character exists to drink, snort a tidy line or two when the mood is right, and generally be a comical but downright loyal pal. The duo is made three with the final addition to their close circle of trusted friends – completing the trio with the relatively attractive conspiracy nutter Billie, who spends her time investigating huge governmental coverups and otherworldly happenings ala ‘X-Files’.
This strong and quirky character base forms the absolute bedrock for the novel. Sure enough, it doesn’t take us long to grow strong bonds with each one of them and their rough-and-ready roots. On the surface this is a trio of absolute outcasts, drinking their lives away in The Dolphin (their North London local). But as we get to know them, their quintessentially British pub banter, their inner struggles and how they are with each other, we see another picture forming in each of them.
Honestly, if character arcs are your thing, then you’re gonna have the time of your life with this novel. The book might be a relatively standard length, but these characters go through a fucking heel of a time in the tale – their journey seeing an evolution in each of them. And watching them adapt and come together through it all is undoubtedly one of the pinnacle strengths of the book.
But what else does the novel offer up? Well, you’ve got some dark, dark shit in there, that’s for sure. We’re talking uncompromisingly vivid depictions of the absolute worst atrocities enacted on a human body. Hannibal Lector ain’t a patch on what these fuckers can do. Demonically artistic with the human body as the sculptors medium.
Essentially the story is a sort of investigative dark thriller with an occultist-horror underbelly to it. A sort of William Holloway take on a dark thriller, only with that aforementioned James Herbert edge that ramps up to a Hutson-style high-octane finale.
I get that this all sounds too fucking good to be true. But trust me, this book really is all that. A gritty story that takes you along with it, effortlessly stroking your intrigue and keeping you invested and thoroughly engaged. The gradually unravelling mystery keeps you tightly immersed in the book. The constant bursts of action and razor-sharp pacing keeping you insanely gripped. And the sheer brutality of the horror on show, delivers the fire in the blend.
As I stated earlier – it’s almost like a story that transitions from a Herbert to a Hutson. In fact, the latter half of the tale dunks its head so deep into the depths of the abyss, that we get some William Holloway vibes coming through from the darkest layers of its horror.
The climax of the novel is also everything you’d want it to be. We’ve got scenes that feel almost plucked from the likes of Argento’s ‘The Church’ (1989), nestled amongst bout after bout of adrenaline-pumping action and fucking bucket loads of bloodspill.
The end result is a novel that grips your hand tight as it saunters along the precipice, teetering on the edge of the dark abyss before pulling you down into a nightmarish hell of the author’s sadistic making.
What Reynolds has achieved with ‘Night Bleeds Into Dawn’ is the absolute epitome of addictive reading. A novel that gets its barbs into you, so you just can’t stop reading. Like a dealer to a horror-junkie, he’s used every trick in the book to keep you hooked. Just one more page. You can’t put the book down now; you just need to see this bit out. Just gotta find out what happens next. Just one more page.
Consider this too…this might only be the first book in a character-driven ‘Jack Carlton’ series. Oh yes my friends, bring it the fuck on!
The novel runs for a total of 283 pages.
© DLS Reviews
