The Haunting Of Alaizabel Cray is a Gothic horror/fantasy about an alternate Victorian London overrun by the wych-kin, daemonic creatures that have rendered the city uninhabitable south of the river, and which stalk the streets after dark. When Thaniel Fox, a young wych-hunter, finds a mad girl wandering the streets in the middle of the night, he is moved by pity to take her home; and in doing so, he becomes embroiled in a plot that reaches into the highest levels of government, and into the darkest depths of the wych-kin’s world.
Presents a dark fantasy set in a parallel London stalked by demons. Wych-hunters such as Thaniel Fox keep all kinds of demons at bay. One night he rescues a young woman, the beautiful and vulnerable Alaizabel. But Alaizabel is nursing a dark secret, one that even she does not understand, a secret that could unleash the most terrible evil of all.
Chris Wooding was born February 28th,1977. His formative years were spent in a grim, squalid ex-mining town in the Midlands, where the crushing monotony of his surroundings fostered a need for escapism that he found in books. Possessed of a frighteningly sharp focus as a child, he had already determined that he wanted to be an author by the time he hit adolescence; and he had barely reached adulthood by the time he had achieved his ambition. He had a literary agent at eighteen; Crashing was accepted for publication when he was nineteen years old and released soon after.
Since it was scarcely possible to stop him writing anyway, the prospect of making a living by doing what he loved - instead of being forced to work at something he didn’t -sparked a fire under him and turned him extremely prolific. He spent the next few years writing feverishly around his English Literature studies at the University of Sheffield, producing a multitude of works across a range of styles, from teenage stories to horror to offbeat fantasy and grim political drama. Every one was published. By the time he left University, he was earning just enough to live on, and he took up writing full-time at twenty-one.
