Blood Crazy: Aten Unbound (Blood Crazy: Book 4) - Simon Clark

At the start of Blood Crazy Book 4, there is a warning to the reader from one of the principal characters in the series that "what happens to Nick Aten during his journey may well have a powerful effect on you". That might sound a little like hyperbole, but as soon as you find yourself reacquainted with Nick Aten just a few pages later in Aten Unbound, you feel the sheer weight of the memory of the horror of the what has come before suddenly hit you. There is no immediate shock event to provoke this feeling, just Nick packing to undertake the next stage of his journey "the first step of a journey I did not want to make", but the accumulation of events that have taken us here seems to re-emerge in a frightening flashback. There are a lot of scenes from those first three books that remain vividly etched in my mind.

Not least the shock opening of the original book that started it all off (and there are spoilers here only if you haven't read the first three books). Every adult on the planet has gone 'blood crazy', overnight becoming mindless monsters that turn on young people, including their own children, tearing them apart with nails and teeth. Anyone under the age of 19 appears to be immune to whatever unknown virus or mind control that has caused this apocalypse, but the survivors are undoubtedly traumatised and struggle to survive in the weeks, months and years that follow, not least because of overwhelming number of roaming hordes of what become known as Creosotes. 

Surviving is getting harder, all the traditional ways of cultivating livestock and agriculture are of course now gone - to say nothing of the loss of technology - and at the start of the latest book in the series another winter is approaching,  A new option has opened up, that Nick and Sarah are going to investigate, but it's one filled with certain danger. They have heard about a place called New Blood City that appears to be thriving, but the problem is that is it not populated by humans as we know them, but Creosote-Plus Types, a new 'evolved' version of humanity.

Apart from the second book, Aten in Absentia, where Jack Ranzic offered a fresh perspective on the escalating crisis, Aten is again the narrator here, and for a very good reason, as his importance in the greater scheme of things is going to come to the forefront (take heed of that warning at the start). If anything, Nick's quirks in this changed world have understandably become even more pronounced. He is guided by superstitions, lives in fear of curses for desecrations and fears that he will pay the inevitable price for missteps that many have cost many before. He is determined that the only response to deal with this is to kill Death. That might sound like he is losing his mind, but, well, the mind is an extraordinary thing and how the individual responds to trauma is unpredictable.

Nick Aten is an unlikely figure to be presented as 'the one', the messianic saviour who is not only going to rid the planet of the plague of Creosotes, but his plan to now defeat Death as well seems unlikely. The 'one' however is made up of many parts, I suggested in an earlier review that Tug Slatter might represent the instinctive and brutal Id aspect to Nick's practical focussed grounding Ego, while Martin Del-Coffey is the Superego on the higher plane of moral conscience and intelligence. While not suggesting that this is a conscious element of Clark's concept, it does at least take into account the many varied human responses that the survivors need to balance to survive the horror they face.

If anything, Clark extends this view in Book 4, where Aten isn't so much 'the one' as 'the many'. There are several other characters in Nick Aten's trusted team of survivors who all offer further nuanced personality traits and values. The introduction of Murten is literally that nagging voice of your worst fears, while the various female characters also present different aspects, not least the spiritual side through Bernadette, another vital figure in the story who introduced Nick to the concept of the First Mind and Second Mind. Nick's role is however central, needing to listen to these voices but dominate and direct them. That's a heavy responsibility.

If I make it sound like the Blood Crazy series has developed into something heavy and philosophical and moved away from its horror genre origin, that is certainly not the case. Lest you think that this is some kind of academic or anthropological study, rest assured that there are still bucket loads of skull-scything, brain-spilling mayhem, battles with thousands of Creosotes of "the murdering kind" where you can be sure that blood-splattered Slatter is somewhere in the midst of it all and with a devastating new weapon in hand.

What elevates this series into something truly special and original is indeed the fact that Clark has introduced a level of 'realism' into the horror; original in terms of how few have really considered humanity undergoing a rapid change that necessitates a re-evaluation of the human condition. Well, up to now, anyway. With new threats of an apocalypse coming from many different fronts in the real world today, I suspect that the question of a reset and a new way of thinking and living is going to be an important topic in the near future for us all. Clark is well ahead of the game on that front in Blood Crazy.

Reading notes: Blood Crazy: Aten Unbound, Book 4 of the Blood Crazy series by Simon Clark is published by Darkness Visible Publishing on the 24th September 2026 in eBook and Kindle formats. My thanks to the publisher for a preview ePub copy of the book.