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Mister Kreasey's Demon
Village teacher, Matt Kreasey, is reduced to paranoia when confronted by the roughnecks he must teach at his new inner-city post in London.
Between flickerings of reality and delusion, his love for his student Amy is strained. Could she be one of those always gathering with the hunting knife that haunts him and which he believes to have already ended the life of a colleague ?
Amy's teacher struggles against his mental illness to relate to her, who he wants to love but can a paranoid now stop himself from destroying she, alone, who might have shown him what love could be ?
Heckled, often ignored and threatened by the street-hardened students who mistake gentleness for weakness in their teacher, Matt Kreasey has perhaps just one vestige of tenderness that he can still recognise in a student who is called Amy. On passing his neighbour on the steps of his apartment while visiting to bring her teacher an overdue essay...
"Kreasey wondered whether his student had appeared before his immaculately groomed neighbour, Doctor Mallaby, in her very highest heels, the ones that gave Amy an extra three-and-a-half inches of height over a world that had always seemed to look down on her. On her first visit, he'd noticed, Amy was slightly undernourished and shivering in a short skirt with a slit up the side. She'd been clutching her essay to her low-necked top and he'd wanted to tell her that she'd made him happy enough - just by appearing on his doorstep with her essay and those eyes which spoke of deprivation and held, for him, openness more beautiful in itself than any he'd seen in any student before."
But she, alone amongst his students, had tried to help him...
"She was searching his eyes, confused. He recalled better times, those moments when her face had shared that open comic side of her lovemaking with him. He so wished he could deliver her from the dross that was her peer group. Unblessed though their encounters had been, he couldn't forget that she'd tried to be his passport to those from 12d... those who always seemed to be gathering, getting closer..."
But reduced to paranoia about his students, Matt has his first doubts about her intentions, despite her intimacy with him...
" 'Well, are we going to see you in them?' she smiled, still holding his shorts out like her trophy. But as he watched her lips they seemed to shape like those in a poorly dubbed film where the voice is out of synch' with the words... reminding him now to 'eat up' all his tablets and that, then, he wouldn't need to be 'cut up'."
The acute anxiety state kicks in again, the paranoia deepening, real love seeming to be no more than a cruel deception...
"He was forty-five, Kreasey thought, middle-aged and he still needed a sixteen-year-old girl to open the bottle for him. Perhaps they were right. Perhaps he should eat up all his tablets. He was going to need the next so badly when Amy had left his bed and the night seemed as if it feared returning to morning."
Between sleeping pills, tranquilizers, flickerings of delusion and hallucination, Matt Kreasey fights to hold to him that which could be most dear - Amy Carter...
"Every tablet that huddled inside the bottle seemed to be a face - not just Jake Blacksmith's - but every shaven head and ring-in-the-nose that noisily packed out classroom 329 where he'd once had to cope...
'Long night teacher,' they seemed to chorus. 'Long is for lithe, panting tiger waitin' for you.'
Amy had slept with him but now something warm and fleshy had covered his eyes, the whole mattress had sagged deep beneath him, his body sprung with the bed... all was dark as moonless night."
Reviews:
Atmospheric; intriguing. Beautifully observed characters.
BARBARA ERSKINE, best selling author of Time's Legacy.
A real page-turner, worthy of comparison with the early John Fowles but distinctively Raymond Nickford.
ALLEN J. MILLINGTON SYNGE , author of Bowler Batsman Spy.
Atmospheric, vibrant, spooky page-turner.
REAY TANNAHILL, historian, novelist and author of The Seventh Son.
As a former London teacher, Raymond Nickford has nailed the teacher's fear at the 'Lord of the Flies' pack mentality perfectly. And what a cliffhanger!
MARSHA MOORE - author of The Hating Game.
This sends shivers down the spine.... the author does anxiety/paranoia so chillingly well.
JANE ALEXANDER - author of Walker.
This title is also available to sample or buy on amazon.com and amazon.co.uk, using either a Kindle reader or a freely downloaded KindleForPC.
Between flickerings of reality and delusion, his love for his student Amy is strained. Could she be one of those always gathering with the hunting knife that haunts him and which he believes to have already ended the life of a colleague ?
Amy's teacher struggles against his mental illness to relate to her, who he wants to love but can a paranoid now stop himself from destroying she, alone, who might have shown him what love could be ?
Heckled, often ignored and threatened by the street-hardened students who mistake gentleness for weakness in their teacher, Matt Kreasey has perhaps just one vestige of tenderness that he can still recognise in a student who is called Amy. On passing his neighbour on the steps of his apartment while visiting to bring her teacher an overdue essay...
"Kreasey wondered whether his student had appeared before his immaculately groomed neighbour, Doctor Mallaby, in her very highest heels, the ones that gave Amy an extra three-and-a-half inches of height over a world that had always seemed to look down on her. On her first visit, he'd noticed, Amy was slightly undernourished and shivering in a short skirt with a slit up the side. She'd been clutching her essay to her low-necked top and he'd wanted to tell her that she'd made him happy enough - just by appearing on his doorstep with her essay and those eyes which spoke of deprivation and held, for him, openness more beautiful in itself than any he'd seen in any student before."
But she, alone amongst his students, had tried to help him...
"She was searching his eyes, confused. He recalled better times, those moments when her face had shared that open comic side of her lovemaking with him. He so wished he could deliver her from the dross that was her peer group. Unblessed though their encounters had been, he couldn't forget that she'd tried to be his passport to those from 12d... those who always seemed to be gathering, getting closer..."
But reduced to paranoia about his students, Matt has his first doubts about her intentions, despite her intimacy with him...
" 'Well, are we going to see you in them?' she smiled, still holding his shorts out like her trophy. But as he watched her lips they seemed to shape like those in a poorly dubbed film where the voice is out of synch' with the words... reminding him now to 'eat up' all his tablets and that, then, he wouldn't need to be 'cut up'."
The acute anxiety state kicks in again, the paranoia deepening, real love seeming to be no more than a cruel deception...
"He was forty-five, Kreasey thought, middle-aged and he still needed a sixteen-year-old girl to open the bottle for him. Perhaps they were right. Perhaps he should eat up all his tablets. He was going to need the next so badly when Amy had left his bed and the night seemed as if it feared returning to morning."
Between sleeping pills, tranquilizers, flickerings of delusion and hallucination, Matt Kreasey fights to hold to him that which could be most dear - Amy Carter...
"Every tablet that huddled inside the bottle seemed to be a face - not just Jake Blacksmith's - but every shaven head and ring-in-the-nose that noisily packed out classroom 329 where he'd once had to cope...
'Long night teacher,' they seemed to chorus. 'Long is for lithe, panting tiger waitin' for you.'
Amy had slept with him but now something warm and fleshy had covered his eyes, the whole mattress had sagged deep beneath him, his body sprung with the bed... all was dark as moonless night."
Reviews:
Atmospheric; intriguing. Beautifully observed characters.
BARBARA ERSKINE, best selling author of Time's Legacy.
A real page-turner, worthy of comparison with the early John Fowles but distinctively Raymond Nickford.
ALLEN J. MILLINGTON SYNGE , author of Bowler Batsman Spy.
Atmospheric, vibrant, spooky page-turner.
REAY TANNAHILL, historian, novelist and author of The Seventh Son.
As a former London teacher, Raymond Nickford has nailed the teacher's fear at the 'Lord of the Flies' pack mentality perfectly. And what a cliffhanger!
MARSHA MOORE - author of The Hating Game.
This sends shivers down the spine.... the author does anxiety/paranoia so chillingly well.
JANE ALEXANDER - author of Walker.
This title is also available to sample or buy on amazon.com and amazon.co.uk, using either a Kindle reader or a freely downloaded KindleForPC.
278 pages, ebook
First published May 23, 2011
1 person is currently reading
4 people want to read
About the author
Raymond Nickford
13 books2 followersRaymond Nickford says that, to him, "people are stranger than fiction, more fascinating".
Perhaps this is what led to his degree in Psychology and Philosophy at University College North Wales. His teaching of English in colleges and as a private tutor has, he believes, informed his literary thriller "A Child from the Wishing Well" featuring an eerie music tutor, her young pupil Rosie and Rosie's paranoid and inept father, Gerard, who nevertheless yearns to mean more to her.
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Raymond-Nickf...
Meet the author :
http://susansbooks37.wordpress.com/20...
"A Child from the Wishing Well" can also be bought or sampled in Kindle from
http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_nos...
This book was selected by Harper Collins for their top 5 Gold Star Award on Authonomy.com, May 2010.
Candace Bowen, author of A Knight of Silence, has written of A Child from the Wishing Well :
"Growing up in a suburb of Chicago, the first scary movie I remember seeing was the 1965 Bette Davis movie, The Nanny. To this day, that movie has always stuck with me as one of the great psychological thrillers of all time. For me, A Child from the Wishing Well, by Raymond Nickford, is reminiscent of that movie.
Ruth, the eerie music tutor, and Gerard strap you in, and take you on a psychological thrill-ride to the very end."
Though people may be stranger than fiction, still, souls – particularly troubled ones – have been indispensable for Raymond's novels, Aristo's Family, Mister Kreasey's Demon and Twists in the Tale.
All these titles can now be sampled or bought for under £1.50 as downloaded Kindle e-books at:
http://www.amazon.co.uk/s/ref=nb_sb_n...
If you don't have a kindle reader, you can now download a free kindle reader to sample e-books on amazon.co.uk using their KindleForPC or on amazon.com.
Nickford's genre, with hints of Hitchcock, is mainly psychological suspense with underlying romance, driven by his interest in "the outsider, the lonely and any driven to extremity".
Perhaps this is what led to his degree in Psychology and Philosophy at University College North Wales. His teaching of English in colleges and as a private tutor has, he believes, informed his literary thriller "A Child from the Wishing Well" featuring an eerie music tutor, her young pupil Rosie and Rosie's paranoid and inept father, Gerard, who nevertheless yearns to mean more to her.
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Raymond-Nickf...
Meet the author :
http://susansbooks37.wordpress.com/20...
"A Child from the Wishing Well" can also be bought or sampled in Kindle from
http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_nos...
This book was selected by Harper Collins for their top 5 Gold Star Award on Authonomy.com, May 2010.
Candace Bowen, author of A Knight of Silence, has written of A Child from the Wishing Well :
"Growing up in a suburb of Chicago, the first scary movie I remember seeing was the 1965 Bette Davis movie, The Nanny. To this day, that movie has always stuck with me as one of the great psychological thrillers of all time. For me, A Child from the Wishing Well, by Raymond Nickford, is reminiscent of that movie.
Ruth, the eerie music tutor, and Gerard strap you in, and take you on a psychological thrill-ride to the very end."
Though people may be stranger than fiction, still, souls – particularly troubled ones – have been indispensable for Raymond's novels, Aristo's Family, Mister Kreasey's Demon and Twists in the Tale.
All these titles can now be sampled or bought for under £1.50 as downloaded Kindle e-books at:
http://www.amazon.co.uk/s/ref=nb_sb_n...
If you don't have a kindle reader, you can now download a free kindle reader to sample e-books on amazon.co.uk using their KindleForPC or on amazon.com.
Nickford's genre, with hints of Hitchcock, is mainly psychological suspense with underlying romance, driven by his interest in "the outsider, the lonely and any driven to extremity".
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
December 25, 2014
Mister Kreasey's Demon first suggested to me a supernatural but the 'demon' is more an invention of the teacher's own troubled mind after taking the mental cruelty dished out to him by the street wise inner city students who are more interested in chewing him up than learning poetry from him.
The theme is universal but Raymond Nickford's treatment was for me what the book description couldn't say about it. The description only hints of Kreasey's being reduced to roaming through the dimly lit corridors of the college buildings where he has to teach. It can't describe the sheer eeriness and desolation of the man as he uses his master key to steal into the closed college buildings at night and roam the corridors, solo, until reaching the infamous room 239 where, by day, his students make mincemeat of the man too sensitive to teach them.
The subtlety in the way the author explores Kreasey's struggle to regain his confidence and then his awkward reaching out to Amy, his young student, also from the back streets is, for me, the most satisfying thing about the book.
Anyone who knows the difference between the hardness of London's Lewisham and the relative gentility of Blackheath as the research reveals it, will again see why I say the theme is universal but the treatment is in a fresh and, for me, a powerful voice.
My only quibble is that I can't quite believe the author has actually measured the height of the walls to Royal Greenwich Park when he writes of the "gaunt twelve foot" high walls, but I know they stand much taller than I am and I'm a good six foot.
The theme is universal but Raymond Nickford's treatment was for me what the book description couldn't say about it. The description only hints of Kreasey's being reduced to roaming through the dimly lit corridors of the college buildings where he has to teach. It can't describe the sheer eeriness and desolation of the man as he uses his master key to steal into the closed college buildings at night and roam the corridors, solo, until reaching the infamous room 239 where, by day, his students make mincemeat of the man too sensitive to teach them.
The subtlety in the way the author explores Kreasey's struggle to regain his confidence and then his awkward reaching out to Amy, his young student, also from the back streets is, for me, the most satisfying thing about the book.
Anyone who knows the difference between the hardness of London's Lewisham and the relative gentility of Blackheath as the research reveals it, will again see why I say the theme is universal but the treatment is in a fresh and, for me, a powerful voice.
My only quibble is that I can't quite believe the author has actually measured the height of the walls to Royal Greenwich Park when he writes of the "gaunt twelve foot" high walls, but I know they stand much taller than I am and I'm a good six foot.
December 22, 2012
I sampled this novel first to see if the book description promised to deliver. The other picture of stately London that the tourist doesn't normally hear about, the godforsaken back streets of the south-east, like Lewisham, were unfamiliar to me because Raymond Nickford seems to keep mainly to parts of the capital where you might most expect teacher Kreasey's "demons" to come out of the woodwork, the demons being Kreasey's living nightmare about the gathering of his students from deprived homes.
Right or wrong, Mr Kreasey's convinced that his street-hardened students dislike of his gentle middle-class manners is going to bring out their knuckle-dusters and flick-knives, which is his students' way of teaching their unwanted teacher a lesson.
The nightmarish feeling that the author builds, with mounting constant threat of something very nasty around the corner for him, is very intense but it's sometimes beautifully relieved by the special understanding he strikes up for one of the students, Amy, who though also from a rough background, senses in her teacher a vulnerability, even though he's old enough to be her father.
It was the tenderness of such an unlikely and strained romance between two people who would otherwise seem as odd a mix as chalk and cheese that moved me and drew me firmly into this book, but I suppose the quality of the character observation and the writing which convinced me it was worth buying to read to the end.Mister Kreasey's DemonRaymond Nickford
Right or wrong, Mr Kreasey's convinced that his street-hardened students dislike of his gentle middle-class manners is going to bring out their knuckle-dusters and flick-knives, which is his students' way of teaching their unwanted teacher a lesson.
The nightmarish feeling that the author builds, with mounting constant threat of something very nasty around the corner for him, is very intense but it's sometimes beautifully relieved by the special understanding he strikes up for one of the students, Amy, who though also from a rough background, senses in her teacher a vulnerability, even though he's old enough to be her father.
It was the tenderness of such an unlikely and strained romance between two people who would otherwise seem as odd a mix as chalk and cheese that moved me and drew me firmly into this book, but I suppose the quality of the character observation and the writing which convinced me it was worth buying to read to the end.Mister Kreasey's DemonRaymond Nickford
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews