Blog Tour- AND HE SHALL APPEAR by @kvdborgh With An Excerpt & A #Giveaway! @UnionSqandCo

I am thrilled to be hosting a spot on the AND HE SHALL APPEAR by Kate van der Borgh Blog Tour hosted by Rockstar Book Tours. Check out my post and make sure to enter the giveaway!

 

About The Book:

Title: AND HE SHALL APPEAR

Author: Kate van der Borgh

Pub. Date: October 1, 2024

Publisher: Union Square Co.

Formats: Hardcover, eBook, Audiobook

Pages: 336

Find it: Goodreads, https://books2read.com/AND-HE-SHALL-APPEAR 

From a mesmerizing new literary voice comes a story of obsessive friendship, chilling powers, and untimely death for readers of dark academia classics like If We Were Villains and The Secret History.
 
An unnamed narrator arrives at Cambridge University in the early aughts determined to reinvent himself. His northern accent marks him as an outsider, but thanks to his musical gifts, he manages to fall in with his wealthy classmate, Bryn Cavendish.

A charismatic party host and talented magician, Bryn enthralls the narrator. But something seems to happen to those who challenge or simply irk Bryn—and they aren’t ever the same again. 

The narrator begins to suspect that Bryn may be concealing terrifying gifts under the guise of magic tricks. As the tension between them grows, a harrowing encounter is followed by Bryn’s death. 

Alternating between their time as students and the narrator’s return to Cambridge years later, where he fears the ghosts of his past are waiting for him, And He Shall Appear performs an astounding slight-of-hand that throws every version of the story into question.

This propulsive novel about the dark power of privilege will haunt readers like a familiar piece of music with endless iterations.

 

Excerpt:

Nobody is afraid of the past. What we’re afraid of is the past  coming loose. We’re afraid that it might free itself from where  we left it and, like a lengthening shadow on an empty street,  slip silently after us until we feel it brushing at our heel. 

I can’t prove what happened between him and me all  those years ago, behind those exalting college walls. Nor can I  prove what’s happening now. But plenty of truths defy physical evidence. Yes, we can make claims, but could you prove to  someone that they were the best friend you ever had? Could you verify your regret at how terribly you let them down?  What about your fear, your implacable, immeasurable fear  that they will never forgive you for it—never forgive, and  never forget? 

Before I met him, I’d only had one experience I couldn’t explain. Something that happened when I was a child. It surprised me, because it wasn’t like the stories we told as we sat cross-legged behind the dilapidated science block, hidden from the dinner ladies who circled the asphalt like blue rinsed sharks. In our Ghost Club tales—about the spirit that  crept between the row of sari shops and the big Tesco, about  the creature that stalked the wasteland where, long ago, the  cotton mills stood—the fear was clear and sharp, like sherbet  on the tongue. But what happened to me was hazy, as if it  existed at the very edge of understanding, of reality. I remember it like this: 

I was sitting up in bed, wrapped in my ThunderCats  duvet, peering at the shapes made unfamiliar by the dark. In the corner, my music stand leaned like the mast of a sinking ship, next to my battered clarinet case and a neglected  football. On my chest of drawers my action figurines stood,  all—I knew without being able to discern their faces—with  their gazes turned toward me. The silence felt a long way  from morning. Something had woken me, I realized. Not a  sound. A feeling, maybe. 

There was someone in the house. 

I had never been a brave boy, and there’s no denying that I felt deeply frightened then. But I also felt a low, irresistible pull. While I was terrified to discover whatever  was moving in the night, I was somehow more afraid of not seeing it. Which is why I rustled softly out of bed and  stepped soundlessly out of my room. 

When my eyes finally adjusted to the darkness, I looked  toward the bedroom at the end of the landing. Through  the door, open just a crack, was my mum’s sleeping body,  reflected in the mirrored wardrobe, made sickly by the  light of her clock radio. There was no spectral figure  floating beside her, no maniac raising a flashing blade. No  movement but for the rise and fall of her chest with each  unconscious breath. 

I moved on to the bathroom. The streaks of moonlight  on the tiles, the faint smell of bleach—all this made the  space feel strangely antiseptic. My tongue became sticky at  the thought that I might discover a figure stretched out in  the bath, its clawed hands ready to curl around the candy striped shower curtain. But when I edged forward and  peered into the tub, there was only the dripping shower head dangling like a hanged man, gazing sightlessly into the blackness of the plughole. Bare toes plucking at the cold  vinyl, I reversed out of the room and back onto the landing. Clutching the banister, I descended the stairs (stretching myself over the final step, which, for reasons I couldn’t  articulate, I never liked to touch) and made my way into  the living room, where the battered recliner hunched in the  corner and the rug reached tasseled fingers across the floor.  Fearful of what I might see, or perhaps of what might see  me, I left the lights off as I padded across the carpet, peeking  behind the sofa and beneath the coffee table as I went. The  house, unremarkable during the day, was peculiar in the  gloom. It crouched and whispered behind my back. When  I looked toward the curtains, drawn tightly across the bay  window, I had the vertiginous sensation that what was  behind them was not normal, and that if I opened them and  looked out into the night I might see something other than  the usual pebble-dashed terraces, the ordinary, overgrown  gardens. Approaching the window sidelong, I took the edge  of one curtain between my fingertips. Peeled it delicately  from the glass. From the darkness beyond emerged a face,  so close I could see the shadows under its eyes, and I would  have cried out had my breath not seized in my chest—but  the face was only my own, reflected ghastly, and beyond it  the street, empty and still. 

Nerves thrumming, I carried on, past the dining table  piled high with laundry ready for ironing, past the sagging  spider plant and its crisping fronds. Finally, into the kitchen,  lit only by the faltering street lamp outside. On my left was  the sink, where metallic drips landed on sauce-crusted pans,  overseen by the stained kettle and crumb-dusted toaster.  

Opposite these was the cooker, flanked by cupboards of  plates and bowls, chipped mugs and old jugs, and empty jam  jars. As ever, there was the smell of damp cloths and cooled  cooking fat. But beneath this, something else—something  organic, like freshly turned soil. There, straight ahead of  me, the door leading into the little pantry, with its panel of  frosted glass. 

And someone behind it. 

I froze. Stared. The silhouette was blurred but for small,  dark rounds where its fingertips pressed on the glass. Its  head swayed from side to side, a serpentine movement that  made me shudder. I wondered whether it—whatever it  was—could see me in the darkness. Whether it could hear  me, or smell me. 

The important thing was to avoid alerting it to my presence, to stay perfectly still while I worked out what to do.  How did it get there? The door behind which it stood was  the only way into the pantry, the only way out. Perhaps, I  thought with a shiver, the thing had always been inside and  we’d simply never known. 

As I stood, it rapped hard at the door. 

I skittered backward, terror thrilling through my body,  my legs charged with the impulse to run. I wanted to call  my mum. But still I felt that grim, reckless need—urgent  now—to stay, to see it for myself. Taking a moment to  slow my breath, I forced my feet toward the door, my body  hunched as if braced for impact. Inhaled, exhaled. 

I clasped the door handle, turned. Pulled. 

Waiting behind the door was my father. But he wasn’t  the right age, not the age he was when I last saw him, the age at which he died. He was a boy like me, maybe ten or  eleven. Instead of being florid and riddled with spider veins,  his cheeks were now fair and dappled with freckles, while  his strawberry blonde hair was styled neatly in a short-back 

and-sides. He looked like a character from an Enid Blyton  book, like he did in the black and white photos I’d once  found in a disintegrating carrier bag. Alongside my terror,  there came a confusion of feelings: anger for everything  that had happened, relief that the person I’d thought was  gone was, in fact, not. Here was a chance to speak to him  again. But it seemed strange to call another child Dad, and I  found myself fumbling over how to say hello. I felt babyish  then, standing mute in my too-short pajamas, and I thought  perhaps I might cry. He didn’t notice. He looked past me,  into the darkness that hung deeper in the house. 

Then, somehow, my mum’s hands were on my shoulders, her voice soaring over my head. “Can I help you?” she  asked him, her tone blandly tolerant, as if she were speaking to a very old person or a salesman. 

They stared at one another. Then my dad opened his  mouth, so wide that it looked as if he might dislocate his  jaw, as if he were letting my mum inspect his teeth. Then  he reached out, would have touched me had Mum not  drawn me sharply backward. I realized that she didn’t recognize the person in front of us. 

I wriggled, straining to see her face, but she only held me  tighter. I called out: Don’t you see who it is? Look at the eyes. But with a swipe, Mum slammed the door and dragged  me out of the kitchen. My feet skidding on the linoleum,  I started to scream. There was the shadow, still shifting, restless, behind the door, with nothing to do but keep waiting to be let in. 

When I told them, the members of Ghost Club were unimpressed. “So it was a dream?” one said. 

“Well,” I said. “Sort of, but—” 

“So it’s not true, then. Not a proper ghost story.” I wondered how to explain that this dream world had  contained a jagged tear of reality. “But it really was my dad.  Coming back.” 

“How’d you know?” 

“I know.” 

“But how?” 

“I just do!” 

“What did he want, then?” 

I shrugged. I hadn’t understood my dad even when he  was alive. 

“So your dad,” whispered one slow learner, the know ledge arriving in her head like a long-delayed train, “is dead?” That afternoon I noticed children whispering and pointing. Some gave me extra room as they passed, as if I were  carrying a population of head lice or a virulent strain of flu.  Later, I found I’d been nicknamed—in that on-the-nose way  of primary schoolers—Spooky, and I resolved not to talk to  the others about my dad again. 

Some time later, puzzling over my dream, I asked my mum:  If a person was born with no legs, would their ghost have no  legs too? Rummaging in the fridge, she said she supposed  so. But what if, I went on, someone was born with legs but lost them in an accident? If they came back as a ghost would  they have legs or not? I remember staring down at my boiled  egg, at my toast soldiers queuing for a dip, trying not to look  at the pantry door. My mum handed me a glass of orange  squash and told me I was being a very morbid boy. 

But I couldn’t stop thinking about it. Why wouldn’t an  old man revisit his loved ones as his younger, stronger self?  Why did we assume he’d spend eternity with arthritis in  his fingers and a bend in his back? And if I died (because at  that age I was still convinced that death would happen to  everyone but me), would I get to choose my own eternal  form? Or would it be chosen by God, by the Devil, or by  something else? 

I thought of the silly little boy I’d been only a few years  ago: the one too scared to cross the road by himself, who  couldn’t sleep without his ladybird night-light. I couldn’t  stand to be like that forever. Even worse, what if my mum  spent eternity as a child too? How, in the afterlife, would  she make my favorite sandwiches, crisp-and-ketchup, with  the crusts cut off? She wouldn’t be allowed to use a knife. 

I also worried that the dream might come back. It hadn’t  been scary as such—not a proper nightmare, scrabbling at  the walls of a well or shambling down a twilit hospital corridor. But it had sunk beneath my skin, left a memory like a  bruise. On the edge of sleep I sometimes jolted myself awake,  thinking I’d heard that knock again. Perhaps he’d be a teen ager this time, or a baby wailing in a Moses basket. Perhaps  he’d be a pensioner with eyes dull as an old fish, his mouth  puckered, older than he ever became in real life. And, who ever he was, perhaps my mum would still slam the door shut. 

I’d almost forgotten about the dream when it returned, in  my final year of university. But, this time, when I stood in  that spectral kitchen gripping the door handle, I knew that the person behind the door wasn’t my dad. It was someone else, someone more recently lost to me. Thankfully,  in the moments before the door shushed open, I forced  myself awake. 

As I lay sweating in the aftermath of the dream, I wondered: Which version of him had been waiting for me  behind the rippled glass? Would he have appeared as my  best friend? Or my worst enemy? 

While I’d never known the meaning of the original  dream, I understood this new one all too well. It was a  warning that he wasn’t gone for good. Maybe one day, terribly awake, I’d catch an uncertain glimpse of him shifting through a crowd at a train station, or I’d pass him at a  pedestrian crossing in the driving rain. Perhaps I’d find him waiting in the stairwell outside the flat. Who would he be,  then? Would he return to me as the tortured soul or the  scene-stealing showman, the conqueror or the conquered? 

I didn’t know. But I was sure of two things. He would  definitely come back. And when he did, he wouldn’t bother  to knock.

 

 

About Kate van der Borgh:

By day, Kate van der Borgh is a freelance copywriter, and by night, she’s usually composing or playing music. She grew up in Lancashire and went on to study music at Cambridge, so there’s a reasonable amount of her in her narrator—including the fact that she was a pianist and reluctant bassoonist. She has, however, never had reason to suspect that her best friend has occult powers. Her short fiction has been published by The Fiction Desk, and she’s a graduate of Faber’s six-month Writing a Novel course. She is based in London.

Website |Twitter (X) | Instagram | Goodreads | Amazon

 

Giveaway Details:

1 winner will receive a finished copy of AND HE SHALL APPEAR, US Only.

Ends October 15th, midnight EST.

a Rafflecopter giveaway

Tour Schedule:

Week One:

9/30/2024	Sudeshna Loves Reading	Excerpt
10/1/2024	TX Girl Reads	Excerpt/IG Post
10/2/2024	Two Chicks on Books	Excerpt/IG Post
10/3/2024	Fire and Ice Reads	Excerpt/IG Post
10/4/2024	Country Mamas With Kids	Excerpt/IG Post

Week Two:

10/7/2024	Bookgirlbrown_reviews	Review/IG Post
10/8/2024	Deal sharing aunt	Review/IG Post
10/9/2024	jlreadstoperpetuity	IG Review/TikTok Post
10/10/2024	Jody's Bookish Haven	Review/IG Post
10/11/2024	@alexandriavwilliams_	IG Review/TikTok Post