Journeys in the Dead Season was a finalist in Richard & Judy's How to Get Published competition and was referred to by one of the judges of the competition as a future Booker Prize winner. Juxtaposing the experiences of a survivor of the Great War with the recollections of an alleged child murderer in the present, this is a masterpiece of psychological complexity.
So little natural light falls into my cell, and I have such a limited view from my window, that at times I feel as though I am entombed within a coffin... Down here, deep within the soil, I must content myself with mental excursions only, tripping beneath the canopies of forests that exist solely in the mind... In the end there is only my voice. A prisoner is on remand in Durham high security jail for what turns out to be a series of attacks on young girls across Leicestershire, culminating in abduction, rape and murder. In the autumn of 1922, Captain Crowe is on a journey across Leicestershire. He intends to visit his old comrades from the War, finish his book on horticulture, and come to terms with a past that still haunts him and a future that terrifies him. The prisoner is reading a copy of Crowe's book, "Perambulations of a Soldier: Autumn to Winter", whilst writing his own diary. Crowe's retelling of his odyssey in his letters, their subsequent appearance within Perambulations and the prisoner's interpretation of them, creates a macabre fusion of past and present, where fact and fiction, truth and reality begin to merge and coalesce...
Spencer Jordan has worked as a software engineer and more recently as a lecturer at the university of Wales. He lives in Cardiff. Journeys in the Dead Season is his first novel.
