The Rouse

Set against decades of British history from the 1970s through the 2000s, the novel interweaves two primary narratives: one following Maur Towns, a bereaved mother investigating her soldier son's death, and another tracing the career of Steven "Stallo" Allardyce, a veteran of a secret British military unit that weaponizes the spectral remnants of dead soldiers. A lyrical second-person prologue addressed to a grieving parent opens the book, establishing motifs of light, loss, and a father's warning to leave the dead alone.

Maur's story begins in 1973, when she returns pregnant to her father's house after leaving university. Her father drives her to London, where she raises her son, Ewan, alone in a Harlesden council flat, supported by her closest friend, Sonya, a former film student and mother of three. Ewan is a quiet, physically brave child who loves climbing trees but struggles with emotional openness. Maur works as a legal secretary and enters a long, unsteady relationship with a television producer named Shaun. After a turbulent adolescence, Ewan joins the RAF Regiment as a reserve gunner, deploys to the Balkans with the United Nations Protection Force, and returns changed, asking Maur cryptic questions about her safety. He dies at Shackingham army barracks; the official account attributes his death to an accident or suicide with his service rifle. Maur's grief is total.

Journalist Jock Crooke contacts Maur with evidence that Ewan's death fits a pattern: Several other young soldiers have died under suspicious circumstances at the same base. Maur joins a campaign for a public inquiry alongside Cybill McCamber, the tenacious mother of Private Julia McCamber, an 18-year-old shot on guard duty at Shackingham. A suspect, a former instructor named Sangster with a reputation for bullying and sexual assault, is found hanged in Spain before he can be questioned. A government report declines to recommend an inquiry, and the campaign stalls.

Then Cybill receives a disturbing package from the base's former commanding officer, Nicholas Teller: a letter in Cybill's own handwriting addressed to her daughter Jules, but with its middle pages dissolved into gibberish. Cybill insists the original, normal version has vanished from her shelf. When the two women confront Teller at his home, something descends the stairs, a figure phasing in and out of visibility, whispering. Behind it, Maur senses a far larger, darker presence. Teller is dragged away; the women flee.

Tom Strude, a young military chaplain who has been feeding the campaign tips, kidnaps Maur and Cybill for a séance. He claims to represent a unit that deals with "revenance events," phenomena born when soldiers die, and that he can help Jules move on. During the séance, Jules begins to manifest, but something vast pushes through behind her. The ritual is disrupted by an armed attack, and a man pulls Maur and Cybill to safety: Stallo.

The novel's second timeline reveals Stallo's history. A working-class Londoner who enlists underage, he serves with the Special Air Service in Malaya during the Emergency, where he kills for the first time and senses a shadowy companion, a green, forest-like presence, watching from behind him. Recruited into R Unit, a classified outfit stationed on a remote English coastal spit, he learns the tools of spectral warfare. The "Rouse," a two-note signal derived from the military reveille, summons the "Roused," entities born at the moment of a soldier's death. These are not souls or memories but new presences, contained in glass traps and deployed through a combination of old technology, occult technique, and intuitive combat skill. Objects called "apports," matter shed by revenance bearing a characteristic flaw or "snag," serve as both tools and currency.

Across decades of Cold War and postcolonial operations, Stallo tracks a revolutionary cell called KH (Kokkino Hayalet, or "Red Spectre"), whose leaders seek to weaponize the dead for anti-imperialist ends. At a séance at a disused airfield, a catastrophe occurs: A malevolent entity calling itself "Old Pal" breaks through. Old Pal is not a revenant but something older and more powerful, something that was never alive. Stallo leaves the Unit, shaken. His comrade Bowler, disillusioned by the Unit's treatment of the Roused, deserts and founds "Apportville," a hidden settlement where living and dead coexist. Stallo eventually tracks Old Pal to the Falkland Islands during the 1982 war and, with remote help from Bowler and his own spectral companion, manages to banish it, losing his companion in the process. He later kills Bowler; Bowler's child, Fez, escapes.

These timelines converge when Stallo takes Maur and Cybill on the run across Europe, claiming the Unit wants to weaponize their children's revenants while Old Pal closes in. The letter, an apport shed by Jules's revenant, keeps reappearing to Maur, its middle pages evolving as more text vanishes into expanding blankness. Jock, found hiding after a terrifying encounter with Fez, known to others by the codename "the Azeri," is persuaded to rejoin them. At Dila's compound, the helicopter hangar of Stallo's old contact, attackers find them. Cybill is shot and killed during the escape; the letter blows free. Maur and Stallo flee to Norway, where Strude captures Maur, accusing Stallo of killing both Ewan and Jules to recruit their revenants. Maur shoots Strude and escapes alone.

Maur spends months in hiding in Spain, working as a cleaner under false names and selling vials of her bodily secretions, which have ectoplasmic properties, to spiritists. She tracks down Fez, who reveals she is the child of a KH figure raised between the living and the dead. Fez refuses to fight Old Pal, insisting it cannot be defeated, and keeps Maur captive, urging her to hide. Maur escapes and returns to England.

She finds Stallo on Bodmin Moor and confronts him. He claims Ewan came to him before his death, wanting to understand what was happening in the Unit, and that they infiltrated Shackingham together, but Ewan deliberately separated from him and chose to die. Stallo proposes using Maur as bait, then knocks her unconscious and straps her into a ritual circuit. Forces led by Wran, a former KH figure now running a privatized continuation of the old Unit, intervene and take Maur underground beneath Shackingham. Wran demands she channel her mediumistic abilities. Using a Rouse engine, a device that amplifies the summoning signal, they launch an assault on Fez's community, channeling energy through Maur.

During this assault, Maur makes a decisive inner journey. She allows herself to be pulled along the channel of the asporting letter, an object departing the material world, sending her consciousness briefly to the realm of the dead. She glimpses her son, who will not turn to face her but speaks to his new community, and returns, bringing revenants who attack Wran's facility. On the surveillance screens, she sees Fez leading Apportville's collective dead against Old Pal. Maur escapes through the building, releasing spectral test animals that assault her pursuers, and climbs out onto the roof of Shackingham Barracks.

In the novel's final pages, set some time later, Maur finds Stallo one last time. She tells him he was wrong about everything. She has not come to kill him, but her "control," the revenant presence now accompanying her, has not forgiven him. She leaves Stallo to face whatever spectral judgment awaits. After a silent farewell to her son, Maur decides to go home. She returns to London, watches Sonya from a distance, and disappears. The novel closes with an epilogue recounting the posthumous performances of the comedian whose act Ewan once watched as a child. Known for catchphrases that were early, unconscious expressions of revenance, the comedian continues performing after death, a final promise that what insists on being heard cannot be silenced.