Titan Books swoops for 'subversive' horror novel from Ned Beauman

Titan Books has swooped for Ned Beauman’s "brilliantly subversive" horror novel, The Captive. 

Daniel Carpenter, fiction editor, acquired UK and Commonwealth rights, including audio, from Jane Finigan at Lutyens & Rubinstein Literary Agency. Rights for screen have already been optioned in a deal negotiated by Lucinda Prain at Casarotto, Ramsay & Associates. Publication is scheduled for September 2025. 

Beauman is the author of the Booker-longlisted The Teleportation Accident (Hodder & Stoughton) and Venomous Lumpsucker (Hodder & Stoughton), winner of the Arthur C Clarke Award. The Captive will be published under Beauman’s pseudonym Kit Burgoyne: "Becoming Kit Burgoyne has allowed me to go for the jugular in a way that the coward Ned Beauman never would have dared. I grew up going to Forbidden Planet every month to buy Titan editions of Vertigo graphic novels, so all these years later it’s very cool to join Titan in their current incarnation as (among other things) this country’s top horror publisher." 

The Captive is described by the publisher as "Succession" meets Grady Hendrix’s The Final Girl Support Group. It is a "darkly comedic, cinematic horror" story about a revolutionary group who kidnap a wealthy heiress, only to discover she is pregnant with the antichrist. 

Carpenter commented: "To read The Captive is to be utterly absorbed by it. Ridiculously fun, laugh-out-loud funny and horrifying—often in exactly the same sentence. I don’t think I have ever read anything quite so politically perceptive, nor as outright entertaining, in a horror novel before."