One of the aspects of the gothic novel that has always pleased me is the “found document” trope, whereby a narrator presents a dossier of material to the reader, as if it were real, puzzling, and (of course) spooky.

In Cat Out of Hell, a bereaved librarian is sent just such a folder entitled “Roger” in which are fragments of an ineptly written screenplay, jpeg images of cats in sun-dappled gardens, and audio files of a man interviewing a cat. All this turns out to be important to our bereaved librarian – it is the background to the death of his wife – and leads him deep into scary situations. And along the way he learns some truly shocking things about the psychopathic nature of cats that explain so much about what they are like to live with.

It was this book, incidentally, that got the review “Impossible not to read in once sitting”, which later (without warning) turned up on covers of my books that require quite a lot longer than that…