The Devil and the Deep Blue Sea

"I hate ghosts! I've played follow-the-leader with a bunch of dead men, fronted up to a demon with all my runes round the wrong way, been half strangled by a book illustration, nearly killed by a bunyip in a launderette washing machine. So when Raissa invited me to a séance I was sure was a fake but turned out to be real, I knew there could only be trouble for Ernie Pine. And there was—wedging a witch, an apprentice magician, an alcoholic Vietnam veteran and me all too literally between the Devil and the deep blue sea…"

About the Author

Rick Kennett (born 1956) is an Australian writer of science fiction, horror and ghost stories. He is the most prolific and widely-published genre author in Australia after Paul Collins, Terry Dowling, and Greg Egan, with stories in a wide variety of magazines and anthologies in Australia, the US, and the UK. His first published short story was "Troublesome Green" (1979). In 1981, Melbourne community radio station 3CR broadcast no fewer than twelve of Kennett's stories to air. A number of his stories have been printed multiple times due to his habit of resubmission-for instance, "Isle of the Dancing Dead" and "The Battle of Leila the Dog." A number of his ghost stories feature the recurring character Ernie Pine, known as "the reluctant ghost-hunter." Another continuing character in his work is the lesbian "trained killer for the state," Cy De Gerch, the heroine of his first novel, A Warrior's Star. Some of Kennett's work is science fiction, but some of his science fiction stories feature ghosts, thus his work crosses genre boundaries that are often kept separate.The St. James Guide to Horror, Ghost and Gothic Writers points out that Kennett is "really the one Australian writer to have produced a substantial body of work in the ghost-story field." While Rob Hood and Terry Dowling have also produced significant quantities of ghost stories, Kennett's concentration on the genre makes him the leading specialist in Australia. Reggie Oliver, reviewing 472 Cheyne Walk: Carnacki, the Untold Stories, has called Kennett "prodigally inventive" and Peter Worthy of Black Book webzine has called the book "a dazzling continuation of William Hope Hodgson's Carnacki the Ghost-Finder."

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