So this happened. It came about because lovely copywriter chap Jon Ryder noticed some weird wording on a sign, and then equally lovely copywriter chap Jonny Cullen suggested it would make a good title for a horror movie (starring Jenny Agutter and Bernard Cribbins), and then original lovely copywriter chap Jon Ryder threw down the gauntlet for me to turn it into a cover (see twitter for the whole chain of events).

I don't normally do covers on request like this, but this immediately struck me as a damn fine excuse to play with the Marber grid and pay homage to one of my all-time favourite Penguin covers, Penelope Mortimer's The Pumpkin Eater. Making up old-style paperback covers is a pretty futile exercise in nostalgism (I resisted artificially ageing it with the usual dog-ears and rips) but it's also rather fun.