Nettles

'One of the most interesting and original young British writers about landscape, culture and people that I know; consistently adventurous in his explorations of place as a novelist, essayist, critic and film-makers.' - Robert Macfarlane 'Adam Scovell is an archaeologist of the imagination, forever unearthing stories like treasure from the soil, raising ghosts, finding links and shining a flickering light into England's hidden corners.' - Benjamin Myers It is the first day of term at a secondary school on Merseyside, 2001. The Towers are soon to fall. A boy cowers in an alleyway, surrounded by a group clad in black. They whip his bare legs with nettles. This is only the start. As term unfolds, their bullying campaign intensifies. Soon the boy finds solace hiding in marshland under the nearby motorway. Voices there urge council with Grannies Rock, a strange stone that sits on derelict land known as The Breck. There, the whispers in the breeze promise a terrible revenge. Twenty years later, the boy has grown. He is back home from London to pack away his childhood. Armed with a Polaroid camera, he aims to exorcise those painful memories through a series of photographs. But is his memory of what happened reliable? Nettles, is a powerful exploration of memory and violence, excavating the stories we tell ourselves to escape our past.

Adam Scovell is a writer from Merseyside now based in London. He completed his PhD in Music at Goldsmiths in 2018. He has written for the BFI, Literary Hub, Financial Times, Little White Lies, and the BBC as well as many other outlets. He is the author of Folk Horror: Hours Dreadful and Things Strange (Auteur, 2017), Mothlight (Influx Press, 2019), and How Pale the Winter Has Made Us (Influx Press, 2020).