Title: Ratmen

Author: Steve Ely

Date: June 2012

Publisher: Blackheath Books

Website: www.blackheathbooks.org.uk

ISBN: ISBN-10: 1-906099-20-0  / ISBN-13: 978-1-906099-20-6

It is with great pleasure that we announce the third in our series of future cult classic novels. Steve Ely's Ratmen, a modern parable.

The man is a ratman. The boy is his apprentice. As they work the various infestations to which they are called, the man gradually inducts the boy into the trade, teaching him a repertoire of creative and bizarre methods of killing rats.

As the boy gains the man’s trust and respect via his developing proficiency in the field of rat extermination, the man progressively reveals his incredible Manichaean worldview.

Sceptical at first, and dogged by doubts about the morality and mechanics of up-close-and-personal-killing, even of rats, the boy is nonetheless hooked by the man’s lurid and dramatic expositions of his fantastic rat cosmology and by compelling anecdotes of spectacular rat slaughter.

As their anti-rat crusade develops in intensity, rhetoric morphs into terror, and a simple story of the adventures of two journeymen exterminators is transformed in an unforgettable and truly shocking conclusion.

Steve Ely is an English writer from the Osgoldcross wapentake in the West Riding of Yorkshire. He writes poems, novels and short-stories addressing a complex of themes devolving around crime, extremism, violence, conspiracy, race, class, identity, politics and religion. He's rarely 'delightful'.

Extracts from his books of poetry -True Crime, JerUSAlem, justified, the compleat eater and Oswald's Book of Hours (to be published by Smokestack in 2013) - are published widely in literary magazines.

He is currently working on his book-length poem, Englaland, a subversive exploration of concepts of England and Englishness, and a novel about a fox. He hunts with dogs. All legal quarry.