In the Scottish village of Ballantrae, tales about the haunted cliffs just up the coast where mythical mass murderer and cannibal Sawney Beane is said to have dwelt in the seventeenth century, still linger. When a group of local boys celebrate finishing high school with a camping trip at the Bennane Head cliffs, they face horror beyond what they ever imagined…

Extract from In The Devil’s Name
By DA Watson
Published by Ringwood Press

He glimpsed movement out of the corner of his eye and turned his head in the direction of the open patio door leading to the shadowy back garden. A large but indistinct shape was materialising out of the gloom, revealing itself slowly as it moved across the back lawn in the direction of the house. Jim froze still, his fist gripping the butcher knife’s handle and the pain in his legs forgotten as a sense of horrible expectancy clutched him.

It crept out of the darkness slowly, savouring Jim’s grey faced terror and the look of dismayed recognition, then it crossed the threshold into the house, fully revealed in the bright kitchen, it towered over him, grinning.

Jim couldn’t scream for a second. His throat seized up, and he just sat there, saucer eyed and drooling. He couldn’t even breathe as sheer fright froze his lungs, and his already tenuous hold on sanity finally snapped before the terrible alien spectacle standing over him.

With his last conscious thought, he raised the butcher knife in front of him and turned the blade not in the direction of the unearthly thing facing him, but towards his own throat, intending to spare himself the awful fate the thing before him heralded. But he was denied even this small mercy.

There was a blur of movement as the thing lashed out with a sinewy clawed appendage, and the butcher knife, still clutched in Jim’s severed hands, dropped between his legs.

And because his broken mind now realised what was about to happen, he finally screamed with such force his vocal cords tore in his throat.

The thing before James Densmore started ripping into him.

In The Devil’s Name, by DA Watson, is out now published by Ringwood Publishing (PB, £8.99)