Where Shadows Learn Your Name

Colin Reardon grew up in a house where all the clocks had stopped. That's not a metaphor. The estate on the edge of the Somerset moors had no working timepieces, and as a child, he learned to measure the hours by the quality of light seeping beneath the cellar door.

That childhood — eerie, isolated, and saturated with the kind of quiet that makes you listen for things — forged a writer obsessed with the margins of the human experience: the moment before terror fully arrives, the space between sleep and waking, the texture of a fear you cannot name.

Since his debut novel The Cold House (2009), Reardon has published fourteen novels, two short story collections, and a single poem that was promptly banned from a literary journal in four countries. He lives wherever he isn't expected.