Chippy

Two hundred years. One secret recipe. Something in the cellar that's getting very, very hungry.Dawn Pickering has had a week. Made redundant by a lad with a lanyard, dumped by her husband for a woman called Krystal (with a K), she's got nothing left but a gas bill and a bin liner full of clothes. Then a solicitor's letter arrives: her great-uncle Cyril has left her The Golden Haddock, a fish and chip shop on the windswept sea front of Saltby-on-Sea, established 1826.There are only two conditions. The batter recipe must never change. And the Tuesday delivery must never be missed.One spoonful of the family's glowing grey Starter, and the queue reaches the bus stop. Within weeks it reaches Leeds. Food critics weep. Coaches defect from Whitby. The whole dying town springs back to life.But the regulars have stopped blinking. They won't touch the vinegar. They sit along the railings at midnight, staring out to sea. Some of them have started breathing through their necks.Because the secret ingredient comes from whatever the fishermen drag up out of the Skelder Deep, and the thing the Grimshaws hauled up in 1826 is still down there, in a flooded cistern under the shop. It's been fed every Tuesday for two centuries. And now that Dawn's put it on the map, it wants a lot more than fish.With a vegetarian daughter, a fryer called Kev who hasn't aged since the Coronation, a fake-Italian rival with fins on his ears and a festival of ten thousand hungry visitors on the way, Dawn has one weekend to save Saltby. Her only weapon is the condiment nobody in town will touch.Salt? Yes. Vinegar? Absolutely. Chips? Get them while they last.The Chippy is a gloriously daft, genuinely creepy British horror-comedy about family, appetite and the price of a good fish supper. Perfect for fans of Terry Pratchett, Garth Marenghi's Darkplace, Shaun of the Dead and The League of Gentlemen.