Read any good motors, John?

[AutoshiteBoy]

This is an excellent read and I recommend it highly.

I re-read that in two days over the easter break. Excellent.

I've also got Setright's original Bristol book which I've never read.

[Warren t claim]

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I remember reading this in school.

15-year-old Neil Miller's world explodes when he and his family are involved in a car accident that kills his parents. Sent to live with his grandparents in a small village named Winchelsea, England, Neil suffers from post traumatic stress. Soon, a devastating illness, called the Calcutta Plague, makes headlines, killing thousands of people in India in a matter of months. The virus begins spreading across the world, making its way to the small village where Neil lives. It is a strange illness as it only affects the adults and none of the children, and once again Neil finds himself an orphan after his grandparents succumb to the disease.

Neil attempts to care for two younger children also orphaned by the plague, but they also contract the virus and die as he tries to care for them. During this time Neil notes that he has contracted the plague, but after a brief fever it leaves him unaffected. Now the sole survivor in Winchelsea and deciding that the village is becoming dangerous - packs of wild dogs, - he leaves for London, taking first a manual Mini which he has difficulty driving, followed by an automatic Jaguar.

Arriving in London he meets his first fellow survivor - the mentally unbalanced Clive, who although friendly towards Neil, during the night vandalizes his car to the point of destroying it, steals his mother's ring that Neil had kept, which was the only memory of his mother he had, and then abandons him in central London.

Soon after he finds two girls, Lucy and Billie, creating an unstable threesome. Attracted to Neil, Lucy begins pulling away from Billie, and in her fear of loneliness and out of desperation attempts to kill Neil when they are on a foraging expedition. She stabs him in the back. Neil discovers she has emptied his gun but he manages to overpower Billie and escapes back to Lucy.

Billie arrives back at the house and pleads with both Lucy and Neil to let her back in, but they decide that they could never trust her again, and leave her outside. In the last paragraph of the book Neil abruptly changes his mind, feeling that he would never get over the guilt of leaving Billie to die, and with Lucy goes downstairs to open the door and let her back inside.

[Warren t claim]

A tiny tangent here that I'm not sure I've mentioned here or not.

This author is a passenger of mine as he lives local to me.

Ramsey Campbell (born 4 January 1946) is an English horror fiction writer, editor and critic who has been writing for well over fifty years. He is the author of over 30 novels and hundreds of short stories, many of them widely considered classics in the field and winners of multiple literary awards. Three of his novels have been filmed.

Since he first came to prominence in the mid-1960s, critics have cited Campbell as one of the leading writers in his field: T. E. D. Klein has written that "Campbell reigns supreme in the field today",[1] and Robert Hadji has described him as "perhaps the finest living exponent of the British weird fiction tradition",[2] while S. T. Joshi stated, "future generations will regard him as the leading horror writer of our generation, every bit the equal of Lovecraft or Blackwood."

We have a deal where he gets a free return journey to the airport if in one of his books he kills me! The agreed way is the murderer kills a lazy, slovenly taxi driver using the screwdriver that the taxi driver keeps in his seat belt buckle to stop the buzzer going off.