The Secrets of Brimstone Manor

The Bill Blackthorne Chronicles is a gothic fantasy trilogy for young adults or the young at heart, full of wonderful humour, yearning romance, spooky manor houses, bikers, secret societies, creepy churches, student high-jinks, campervan travels and ancient lurking evil...
Step back in time, not too far really, to the early 1970’s, a world very different from our own. There are no mobile phones, no laptops, no social media, not even a sniff of the internet, but what is there, and in spades, is mystery, magic, secret societies, witches, warlocks and the weirdest thing of all – a creature called Arddhu Og that invades the mind with her own fearful agenda. Middenmere is a university town that seems like any normal place on arrival, but as you get to know it you soon realise all is not what it seems…
The Secrets of Brimstone Manor
Bill Blackthorne is a shy and nerdy young man with some very serious problems. He has no recollection of his past and can see horns and yellow eyes on people who appear perfectly normal to others. Bill’s earliest memory is waking up in gloomily gothic Brimstone Manor, where a strangely deranged middle-age woman called Beryl tells him she is his mother. He is enrolled into a secret society called the Apostles, who tell Bill he is very important – that he knows a great and profound secret, vital to their cause, which they intend to extract from his clouded memories with strong psychotropic drugs and ‘sixteen-volt electro-convulsive treatments’. Bill doesn’t like the sound of this at all.
He is desperate to escape the clutches of the smothering and subtly sinister Apostles, and when he befriends Arthur Small from the nearby village of Underwood, he knows he has met someone who will help him. Arthur goes off to study at the ancient university of Middenmere, but Bill is also taken there for his treatments and they bump into each other. They meet two very pretty but intense and dark girls, Lilith and Ophelia, who invite then to a very unusual party to do something very unusual to the boys...
The girls are secretly witch-freaks use the boys in a terrible way to dabble in powerful and ancient magic they don’t really understand. Their dabbling sets off a catastrophic chain of events that forces Bill to remember his very bizarre past and realise his amazing destiny. In a climatic end that threatens to destroy everything they hold dear, Bill and Arthur are thrown into a desperate race to save those they love.
This is the first book in The Bill Blackthorne Chronicles trilogy, which consists of:
The Secrets of Brimstone Manor
The Villainy of Victor Tainn
The Fortunes of a Frightful Dragon
There is also a superb anthology edition featuring all three books in one volume, together with an author’s introduction and special bonus material.
The Bill Blackthorne Chronicles trilogy is a dazzling must read for all fans of dark and spooky fiction who like liberal doses of fun.
REVIEWS
"Mike Mannion's books are well plotted with characters that leap off the page." Colin Barnsley - Author of the musical Atlantis.
"Certainly knows how to keep you hooked." Chris Tunstall - Book reviewer and author of Guardian of the One.“
Mike Mannion has the knack of writing an engaging plot and vibrant characters, that keep you wanting to turn the page!” Amazon UK customer.