A stark, mythic, psychologically precise horror novelette from Ben Day.Anne Cross has spent her life making other people smaller.Now, in the silence of her empty house, something begins to grow.Flowers appear in the garden — pale, papery, the colour of a yellow that has forgotten itself.Behind them stands a figure.It does not move.It does not speak.It waits.As the nights shift and the boundaries thin, Anne is forced to confront the version o...

VeritasCallum moderates the worst of the internet so the rest of us don't have to. Scroll. Flag. Delete. Move on. Never engage. He's been good at his job for six years. He's also been empty for just as long.Then, buried in a forgotten server, he finds an image that shouldn't still exist: a framed print of something half-shadow, half-man. A caption that reads like a warning. He is watching. He has been waiting.He should delete it. He saves i...

When Elias arrives in a remote Cumbrian valley to study a centuries‑old heronry, he expects solitude, routine, and the quiet comfort of fieldwork. Instead, he finds a landscape that feels older than its maps, a gathering of grey birds that should not be possible, and a woman who seems to recognise something in him he has never understood in himself.As the herons multiply and the valley closes around him, Elias is drawn into a pattern older than the mill, older than the village buri...

In a remote Cumbrian valley, Edith lives alone — not lonely, but watched.The rooks at the wall know her. The wood behind the cottage knows her. The land remembers the promise made long before her grandson arrives.When Carl comes to "check on her," something older stirs. His questions are sharp. His eyes are measuring. And the valley does not like to be measured.As the rooks gather in unnerving numbers and the silence thickens around the cottage, Edith begins to unde...

The cottage had been waiting for him.Dr Ian Baxendale comes to Wasdale to recover. A remote valley, an old cottage, silence. Everything a burnt-out surgeon needs to heal.The mist has other plans.It arrives on the first morning and does not lift. The valley disappears. The world shrinks to grey. And in the grey, things begin to stir — sounds, shapes, memories he has spent a lifetime not looking at.Something is in the yard.Something knows his name....

The herons are gathering again.Kathy Wharton has spent fifteen years collecting fragments of something she cannot explain. Elias Thorne has spent a year away from the valley, finally understanding what he is. When he returns, they follow the lines on a hand‑drawn map across three countries — north to Perthshire, west to Wales, across the water to Ireland — assembling the pieces of something that has been waiting centuries to be known.The countdown has already begun....

The grey was gone.The date has come and gone. May 19th passed quietly, the way the old world's significant moments always passed — without announcement. Simply there, and then done.But the map is still pointing north.Elias Thorne and Kathy Wharton thought the convergence was the end. They were wrong. The eclipse is coming — the longest darkness of the century — and the veil between worlds is thinning. The disconnected are fading. The herons are turning white. And th...

The shadows of the past are never far away...Detective Chief Inspector John Shadow is doing his best to ignore the madness of York’s annual Viking Festival when duty calls. The body of a wealthy businessman, who was playing the role of the Viking king, is found slain by his own ancient sword. The murder scene looks staged, but before Shadow can compile a list of people to question a second body is found. Shadow doesn’t have to look far for suspects—the victims were...

Winner - Best Novel - British Science Fiction Association Awards, 2024The Green Man sends Daniel Mackmain to stop threats from folklore making trouble in the everyday world. Now a naiad and dryad want him to deal with the big cat they’ve seen prowling in their woods. Reports like this turn up in the tabloid press from time to time, though no one has ever caught such a cat, or even found evidence of a large carnivore’s kills.Can Dan discover the truth behind this modern myth...

They were like birds. Large, black birds – shadowy descendants of pterodactyls – gathered in the shadows and out of sight. A movement from one of them could be dismissed as a trick of the light – the mind placing tricks with the shadows of the night. They were hungry. Ravenous. And they could feel their next meal getting close. A rip in time. Juicy energy waiting to be consumed. Gathered around one special person. A person with the potential to change the world. All they had to do was find...

Do Not Pass Go by Joel Lane is the first Hotwire short story pamphlet from Nine Arches Press.These five crime stories dive into the shady undertow of Britain's second city, walking with characters you might well want to cross the road to avoid. Lane's prose is never less than deft, subtle and impressive, the stories taut and teeming with urban detail, always on the brink of either violence or revelation."Joel Lane documents a life we don't quite liv...

The Book Collector is the guy Telford calls when one of his Mythos volumes goes missing. This time the renter is dead and the book is gone. Can the Book Collector find it in 24 hours, and can he beat another who wants it just as much? Enough to kill for it.