Lost in the Garden - Dead Ink Books

I’ve been meaning to write about Dead Ink Books for quite a while now. I picked up their folk horror bundle a little over a year ago and loved all three novels (Lamb, Water Shall Refuse Them, and Lost in the Garden). Having just finished the last of the trio, it feels like the right time to finally put something down about them. But first, a little about Dead Ink Books.

Dead Ink began in 2011, started by Wes Brown in Leeds, with a grant from Arts Council England. They published their first print titles in 2014, and since then have continued to put out amazing books outside the mainstream. Their books are weird, strange, sometimes horrifying and always entertaining. They’re based in Liverpool and have a shop on Smithdown Road. 

They won the Small Press of the Year award for the North of England in 2025 and have a fantastic list of upcoming books to look forward to, including the kickstarter project The Eden Book Society — 1993, which features authors such as Grady Hendrix, Nina Allan, and one of my favourite musicians of all time, John Darnielle of The Mountain Goats. 

I don’t know how, or if it is even possible, to describe Lost in the Garden. It’s a strange, peculiar book. The cover is enchanting, with beautiful use of colours reminiscent of the 2019 film Midsommar. It looks great on my bookshelf, and it wouldn’t be fair to talk about this book without giving praise to the designer, Luke Bird (who also designed the beautiful cover of Lamb and Water Shall Refuse Them). All of Dead Ink’s books have a unique design where it is immediately recognisable as Dead Ink, and I believe Luke has no small part to play in this.

Dead Ink’s commitment to publishing the strange and the uncanny is captured perfectly in Adam S. Leslie’s Lost in the Garden. It has been described as ‘hazy’ and ‘dreamlike’, and I agree with these descriptions, though it is much more a fever nightmare than a pleasant dream. Each night I settled in to reading it, I stayed up significantly later than I intended with an itch to know what was going to happen next. The book won the 2024 Nero Book Award, an award given to ‘unputdownable’ books. Part sci-fi, part horror, and wholly illogical, it’s as gripping as it is disorienting. The book features zombies or ghosts(?) I’m still not too sure. It features number stations, and strange radio messages, witchlike people, curses and general esoteric spookiness.

The worst part about living in the countryside is all the nay-sayers. Or horses as they’re more commonly called.

Like much of Dead Ink’s list, it’s a novel that thrives in ambiguity, blending the real and the surreal until you can’t quite tell where one ends and the other begins. Heather, one of the main characters, is as irrational as the book, a driving force for chaos that fits firmly within the chaotic world in which she exists. She and two friends, following the jingle of an ice cream truck, set off on a road trip, dodging the zombie/ghosts to the place where all the weirdness began. 

Don’t walk on the quicksand, don’t touch the powerlines, don’t go off with strangers, don’t play on the farm, don’t go to Almanby.

The book is a must read, pick it up at Dead Ink Books here https://deadinkbooks.com/product/lost-in-the-garden/