To those in the suburbs of Birmingham, The Wallows Housing Estate was the most frightening place in the city…and they didn’t even know about the monsters…

After failing to get a place at his suburban parents’ preferred secondary school, Mick ends up at Rookwood Academy, the roughest inner-city school in Birmingham, where most of the kids come from the feared Wallows Housing Estate. Mick is immediately bullied, ostracised and abused. He just about gets by and finds himself infatuated with Elisa Kean. Punk to the core, tough, smart; Elisa Kean is from The Wallows Estate and seems untouchable to even the worst kids at the school. Quickly bonding  with Eliza through their love of punk music, horror films and books, along with how alienated they are from so many of the other kids, Mick and Liz become close friends. Months later, Liz tells Mick The Wallows is home to worse things than he could imagine. Monsters, phantoms, creatures that the residents at the estate have known about forever. Uncle Rat-Jacket, The Shambling Granddad, Beryl Twilight, The Leech-Lipped Lovers of the Old Arcade and so many others.

Frightened, but wanting to be as big a part of Liz’s life as possible, Mick promises to go there, to The Wallows with Liz, to see what she’s seen, to show her he believes in them. That day never comes. One terrible night, her little brother vanished, Liz suddenly taken into care away from the city, her mother dead, a riot at The Wallows…by the time Mick gets there, he’s alone, a promise made to Liz to look for her brother. What he finds at The Wallows terrifies Mick, sends him fleeing from the estate, hoping never to return.

Twenty years pass, twenty years without Liz, twenty years hiding from the memories of that night at The Wallows. Twenty years later, The Wallows derelict, burned, foreclosed and ruined, Liz returns from the shadows, ready to cash-in Mick’s promise. Together, one last time, Liz and Mick head to The Wallows, to its hells, its horrors, To Those from Below.

A working-class cosmic horror fantasy, decorated with social commentary and original terrors, ‘To Those from Below’ follows ‘At Night, White Bracken’ as Gareth Wood’s latest novel.