The Thing on the Shore Book

The Thing on the Shore takes place in a call-centre in Whitehaven just a short hop from Sellafield along Cumbria's grim western coastline. When Artemis Black (from The Leaping) is assigned to manage the centre on behalf of a mysterious multinational corporation called Interext the isolation and remoteness of the place encourage him to implement a decidedly unhinged personal project installing what purports to be cutting-edge AI technology with a real human' voice on the automated answering systems. As a result of Artemis' actions one of his employees Arthur becomes aware of an intangible landscape inside the labyrinthine systems of the call-centre - a landscape in which he can feel some kind of otherworldly consciousness stirring and in which perhaps as a result of his father's increasingly alarming eccentricities he feels that he could find his recently deceased mother. Arthur takes refuge in this belief as his father his job and his house slowly deteriorate around him. He begins to conflate the mysterious interstitial region that exists down the phonelines with the sea as that was where his mother drowned.In a way he is right - Artemis' meddlings have attracted something it is just not as benevolent as he thinks...