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Quercus has bought the rights for two books by 24-year old debut novelist Tom Fletcher. Nick Johnston, trade fiction and non-fiction editor, acquired world rights from literary agent Nicholas Royle.
The first title, The Leaping, centres around a group of former students working in a call centre in Manchester. To try and escape their daily boredom they buy a house in the Lake District but find that it is situated near a pack of werewolves. The book will be published as a B-format paperback original in July 2010.
Johnston said: "Tom is a phenomenon – he’s a young writer with an edgy, energetic and wholly original style who might just have invented the genre of call-centre horror, but he also knows the classics and is the rightful heir to that Lovecraftian maxim which says the things that scare us most are the ones we don’t understand."
His second novel, The Thing on the Shore, features some of the same characters as The Leaping. This is also set in a call centre, in which the phone system is taken over by an "extradimensional entity". The Thing on the Shore will be published in summer 2011.
"[Fletcher] speaks for a generation that’s got the highest level of university education in history, but has largely found themselves trapped in mind-numbing temp work," added Johnston. "He’s perfectly captured the fear and violence that lurk beneath the surface of our society."