Tag: Summer 2025
THE CROW STONES: COMING SOON
I press on, in the darkness, throwing out my hands to navigate via the walls, stepping carefully as I track the contours. I reach a more traditional doorway and find a knob. I turn it, gently. It opens. There is light behind this door. I peer through the jamb. A hidden room of grey slate….
THE CROW STONES: LOCATIONS – THE RIVER HINGE
As he carries on with these lies, designed to humanise himself before me, I remain abstract, detached from his plans, and I say what needs to be said. ‘The Swimming of Witches was probably the most famous of all the trials carried out by your brethren. Innocent girls and women, dubbed witches, because they were…
THE CROW STONES: LOCATIONS – BLACK LARCH WOOD
This is sheer, abject terror. The worst kind of fear. The unknown. It is when we are at our most vulnerable… I recognise fear and my amygdala is activated. It has alerted my nervous system, which has set my body’s fear response into motion. Cortisol and adrenaline are released. Blood pressure and heart rate increase….
THE CROW STONES: LOCATIONS – JACKDAW HILL
Mr. Olyphant has lived all his life in relative isolation, in his ancestral home atop Jackdaw Hill. Like a king atop his throne, he lords over us, from this quaint cottage-castle in the sky on the outskirts of the village. I’ve always thought of him as more of a handsome black bear, than beast, but…
THE CROW STONES: COMING SOON
As the image sharpens, it develops the detail of a figure stood at the rock of obsidian, swamped in a purple robe and hood. The stranger’s identity is obscured to me, but from this new angle, I notice that Callie’s knife is dripping…not crimson with blood, but a grey slurry, reminiscent of a grotesque gruel,…
THE CROW STONES: COMING SOON
What stands before me is something born from the annals of monstrosity. A hybrid beast, an amalgam of human and animal form. There are six of them, torchbearers, stretching up on hind legs, standing in a hierarchical pyramid; one at their lead, two behind and three at the rear. “What are you? Why did you…
THE CROW STONES: A TALE OF TWO SISTERS
Please allow me to introduce the back cover blurb for my New Adult Gothic Romance novel, The Crow Stones, which will be released in the summer of 2025. It takes the form of a simple letter from one sister to another. One alive. One dead. In the words of Lydia Leonard to her departed sister,…