Hunger by Melvin Burgess   Contributors to the Hammer Horror novellas series include the controversial children’s writer Melvin Burgess (controversial, this is, to some adults who have objected to his frank and unblushing treatment of mature themes in young adult novels – his concomitant standing among his teenage readers could not be higher.) Hunger features a young woman waking up one morning covered in dirt and attributing her condition to a case of extreme sleepwalking, until reports of a desecrated grave grant her nocturnal perambulations a more frightening aspect. While the novel is suggestive of Hammer only in the broadest sense, its treatment of the awakening of ancient evil is something that might have warmed the cockles of such Hammer alumni as Michael Carreras and Terence Fisher. But Burgess has always been a writer who has a pronounced skill for destabilising the reader, and that particular ability is well to the fore in one of the more impressive entries in this revived Hammer franchise.

Hunger by Melvin Burgess, Hammer £9.99 9780099576648