The Sinister Cabaret

An Edinburgh advocate experiences humiliation and terror in a surreal Scottish Highland adventure.

Donald Humbie, leaving behind his career and his wife in Edinburgh, heads north to familiar places for a short break. Unfortunately, the familiar places have become unfamiliar and increasingly hostile.

Each setting, each character, each event is an unsettling side-step away from normality in a dark, surreal landscape that has Donald fleeing manically around the country. Fearing that his wife has been abducted, he seeks out MacNucator, a private detective, to find her.

Meanwhile the Sinister Cabaret, led by the strange and unfathomable Mr Motion, pursues him relentlessly.

John Herdman's characters inhabit a dark universe illuminated by his profoundly laconic wit. In the Sinister Cabaret he continues the exploration of extreme states of mind and ambiguous interior worlds with the Gothic imagination, which has led critics to compare him with James Hogg and R L Stevenson.

Gothic, surreal, and type Jungian to the max, this hypnagogic novel from John Herdman will take you to the edge of reason.

“The narrative combines a series of journeys and encounters, an atmosphere compounded of nightmare, comedy and erudition, which is uniquely Herdman… There is a quality of surreal experience, comic nastiness, metaphysical horror … the always gripping narrative becomes intense and moving.”An Edinburgh advocate experiences humiliation and terror in a surreal Scottish Highland adventure.
Donald Humbie, an Edinburgh advocate of every kind of substance, undergoes an interior experience of humiliation and terror, totally losing his way in a surreal Scottish Highland adventure.

Donald Humbie, leaving behind his career and his wife in Edinburgh, heads north to familiar places for a short break. Unfortunately, the familiar places have become unfamiliar and increasingly hostile.

Each setting, each character, each event is an unsettling side-step away from normality in a dark, surreal landscape that has Donald fleeing manically around the country. Fearing that his wife has been abducted, he seeks out MacNucator, a private detective, to find her.

Meanwhile the Sinister Cabaret, led by the strange and unfathomable Mr Motion, pursues him relentlessly.

John Herdman's characters inhabit a dark universe illuminated by his profoundly laconic wit. In the Sinister Cabaret he continues the exploration of extreme states of mind and ambiguous interior worlds with the Gothic imagination, which has led critics to compare him with James Hogg and R L Stevenson.

Gothic, surreal, and type Jungian to the max, this hypnagogic novel from John Herdman will take you to the edge of reason.

“The narrative combines a series of journeys and encounters, an atmosphere compounded of nightmare, comedy and erudition, which is uniquely Herdman… There is a quality of surreal experience, comic nastiness, metaphysical horror … the always gripping narrative becomes intense and moving.”
Isobel Murray, The Herald & Scottish Studies Review