an experiment gone wrong...
It is the end of the school term. But while most of
the pupils at Our Glorious School are either
returning home to their families or heading off on
the Geography field trip, five sixth-former slip
through the net. The authorities think they are at
home. Their parents think they are on the field trip.
In fact, they are in The Hole, embarking on what
their friend and mentor Martyn has called 'an
experiment with real life'...

The Hole is a windowless cellar room, forgotten
deep beneath the school buildings. The group is to
be locked in for three days: at the end of the
experiment, Martyn will return to let them out again.

At first, it seems like a laugh: a secret slumber-party.
Solid Mike and dependable Liz, Geoff with his
secret supplies of booze, irritating Frankie and delicate Alex - all are looking forward to the story
they'll have to tell when Martyn releases them. What will they have learnt about each other? What
will the result of the experiment be?

But the three days pass and Martyn does not return.

Out of food and water, trapped and helpless, the group start to realise that this is no game, and that
Martyn is not who they have thought...
what the critics said
'A scintillating debut... Burt's will be a name to watch' Daily Mail

'Astonishingly assured - if he can keep it up, quite a future is in store' Literary Review

'The final stunning chapter sets this short novel apart' Today

'A frighteningly good plot... expertly borrows the horror and tension that made William
Golding's Lord of the Flies such a success' Metronews

'Compulsively sinister... admirable maturity' The Times

'Insidiously brilliant' The Independent
buy it online!
author commentary
After the Hole was the first thing I wrote based around people my own age. When I left school, I was
seventeen, so that's the age of the characters of the story. I wrote them very much as if they were
people I knew, though of course the incidents that befall them are rather out of the ordinary.

The school in the novel, which I rather elusively refer to only as 'Our Glorious School', is really
Charterhouse, which is where I'd been. The description of the entrance to the Hole matches
exactly the deserted stairs by 'C' block, the English department where I had many of my A-level
classes. Parts of the characters of Mike and Geoff, in particular, are drawn from people I knew.
Frankie - or someone very much like her - was in my A-level Art class. Large parts of Liz's character
are based on me: especially the way she's comfortable with being self-sufficient and relatively
isolated.

I started the novel during my Gap year, while teaching at a prep school in Devon. During that time,
the story changed direction once or twice and I had to begin all over again at one point. (For more
on the whole writing process, and more details of how After the Hole progressed, have a look at
the frequently asked questions page where I've covered some of that territory in some depth.) By
the time the summer holidays came round, I'd written about half the novel and it had taken maybe
ten months. I wrote the second half in a week. My family had gone away on holiday so I had the
house to myself, and I don't think I left the house at all that week: I lived out of the fridge, never saw
natural light, started first thing and finished late. I'd got the book so clear in my head by this point
that it just steamrollered out of me.

As a novel, it has attracted quite a lot of attention one way and another. Part of that's due to the fact
that I was only eighteen when I wrote it, which is pretty precocious. ('Precocious' basically means
'irritating', as far as I can make out.) It's also a novel with a really clear central premise: it's a survival
story with the odds terribly stacked one way. I wanted, right from the start, to make it clear that there
is no way out of the Hole - no secret door, no forgotten passage, no forming a human pyramid to
reach the locked door. No chance of escape. If there could have been a physical way of getting out
of this cellar, then the book would have had no point. It's about trying to escape even when there's
simply no way...

It's also a story about the awkward ways in which seventeen-year-olds handle relationships and
intimacy. The five people in the Hole are school friends. As they start to realise that they may die
down there, they also realise how little they really know each other - how superficial their
friendships have actually been. When I left school, I kept vaguely in touch with a couple of friends,
but our lives drifted apart and we found we had increasingly little in common. I don't think in five
years I ever had a conversation with one of my friends that really dipped below the surface of our
feelings. (I did at university: and those friends have stayed with me.) So the Hole is a cruel, painful
forcing of these adolescents to reappraise what's important, and to realise what they perhaps
should have done differently.

Martyn is the psychotic, charismatic genius whose 'experiment' the Hole is. For someone who's
off-stage, as it were, for most of the novel, he certainly captures people's attention, judging by how
people have talked to me about the book. Martyn isn't based on anyone in particular, but to a
certain extent he's the dark side in all of us, carried to extremes. The moment in the book that I,
personally, think most chilling isn't one of the big, dramatic moments. It's just a little aside that Liz
makes about Martyn, looking back on the Hole, when Mike asks her if she thinks Martyn might
come back to threaten them again - for revenge, maybe. Liz answers: 'No. I think he's finished with
us. But that doesn't mean he's just going to lie down and fade away. I think one day, Martyn will
have something to say to the world. Maybe forty years from now.' For me, that's central to the book:
that, in the Hole, we're seeing the start of Martyn's 'career' as a psychopath and a killer.

And then there's the ending. The thing everybody wants to ask me about!

I'm saying nothing about the ending; that's over to you as reader. Though perhaps if enough
people petition me in the online forum, I might offer an opinion. Try me.

Recently, of course, the book has had a renaissance. First, the film based on it has - after six years
in 'development hell' - been shot, and is due for release this April. Though it won't be exactly the
same as the book, it looks like a really creepy, dramatic piece of cinema and I recommend it warmly.
Partly as a result of this cinematic transmogrification, the novel is also being republished. It'll have a
new cover with a still from the film, and a slightly different title, too: just The Hole, rather than After
the Hole. (This is to mirror the title of the film, which in turn was changed, I think, because it was
considered that 'After the Hole' sounds perhaps a little too enigmatic.)

It will also be the first of my three novels to be published in America, by Ballantines. The other two
will follow at one-year intervals. So if you're reading this Stateside, you, too, can immerse yourself
in the life of an English 'public' (=private) school one of whose students is actually the perfect
criminal...

Just don't forget to leave the light on while you're reading...