#gothic-fiction — Public Fediverse posts

My ebook The Bone Sculpture is now available on Kindle Unlimited
If you enjoy dark fiction, unsettling mysteries, gothic atmosphere, and stories that slowly get under your skin, you might like this one.
It’s a story about obsession, secrets, and the strange things people create to survive.
You can read it for free with Kindle Unlimited:
www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B0DFWH6N9C
#Bookstodon #IndieAuthor #KindleUnlimited #DarkFiction #HorrorBooks #GothicFiction #AmReading #BookMastodon #WritingCommunity

Starting today: Dracula Daily
This is an email newsletter that sends you the novel Dracula, in 'real-time', as it happens to the characters.
https://draculadaily.com/

#Dracula #vampire #newsletter #gothicfiction #gothic #victorian #BramStoker #reading #BücherSonntag #books

The Enduring Appeal of the Gothic in Fiction

Author Rosemary Hennigan reveals the enduring appeal of the gothic in fiction by sharing what gothic is and many gothic books to check out.
The post The Enduring Appeal of the Gothic in Fiction appeared first on Writer's Digest.
https://www.writersdigest.com/the-enduring-appeal-of-the-gothic-in-fiction

#Genre #Horror #MysteryThriller #WriteBetterFiction #gothicfiction

Give Me Back My Face

(Or The Wrong Skull of Petrarch)

I had not wished to go to Arquà.

There are villages which seem made for the living, and villages which, though inhabited, have long since given themselves over to the dead. Arquà was of the latter kind. Its stones were too old to be merely stone. Its narrow lanes did not wind so much as remember. The olive trees, twisted by centuries of patient weather, leaned over the walls like ancient witnesses too weary to speak, and the cypresses, those solemn candles of the graveyard, stood black and thin against a November sky the color of old pewter.

I arrived near dusk, when all things are least certain.

The bells had just finished striking the hour, though their sound remained in the air, a bronze trembling caught between hill and cloud. Below, the Euganean hills rolled away in vapor and fading green; above, the first cold stars appeared as if pricked through a shroud. The village did not receive me. It endured me. A few shuttered windows glowed faintly. A dog barked once and then, as if reminded of some local sorrow, fell silent.

I had come because of the tomb.

It was not my profession to disturb graves, though I confess I had spent much of my life disturbing the dead by other means. I was a scholar of poetry, which is to say a licensed trespasser among the bones of vanished souls. I had handled Petrarch’s letters until I imagined I knew the warmth of his hand. I had traced the fever of his longing through sonnet after sonnet, until the name Laura became not a woman, nor a ghost, but a wound preserved in amber. I had believed, in my arrogance, that to study a man’s words was to approach his face.

Then came the news.

They had opened his tomb.

They had found the body.

They had found the skull.

But the skull was not his.

From the first report, I was seized by a feeling I could neither dignify as scholarly curiosity nor dismiss as superstition. It was not merely that some fraud, some theft, some accident of centuries had occurred. Such things are common in the traffic of relics and remembrance. The saints have been divided among churches like inheritances among quarreling sons. The bones of kings have been misplaced. Philosophers have lost their heads, literally and otherwise. But Petrarch — Petrarch, the singer of absence, the architect of longing, the man who made Europe fall in love with its own inward wound — lying in his grave beneath a stranger’s skull!

The thought took hold of me.

It was as if the earth itself had composed a final metaphor.

I had known grief. I had known the peculiar loneliness of the learned man, surrounded by books and yet accompanied by no human breath. I had known what it was to love an idea more faithfully than a person, and then to wake in the night, chilled by the suspicion that the idea had fed upon the person until nothing living remained. But this discovery stirred in me another kind of dread: the terror that we are all, in the end, divided from our own faces; that the world remembers our names, preserves our labors, recites our words, and yet places upon us the wrong head.

The churchyard lay under a dim wash of moonlight when I first stood before the tomb. It rose there in its stone dignity, aloof and mute, as though it had not recently been accused of deception. I laid my hand upon it, and the cold entered my palm with such sudden intimacy that I withdrew.

There was a smell in the air — rain, cypress, old masonry, and something faintly sweet beneath it all, the breath of opened earth. I had smelled it before in crypts. It is not decay exactly. Decay is honest. This was older, more ceremonial, like time itself exhaling.

“Signore?”

The voice startled me.

An old custodian had approached from the side of the church. He was bent but not frail, wrapped in a dark coat, with a face folded by years into lines of permanent suspicion. He carried a lantern, though the electric lamps had already been lit near the path. Its flame moved nervously behind glass.

“You should not be here after dark,” he said.

“I came to see the tomb.”

“So do many.”

“I came because of the skull.”

At that, his expression altered. Not surprise — he had heard the word too often by then — but a guarded weariness, as if the skull had become another inhabitant of the village, unwelcome yet impossible to evict.

“They talk too much,” he muttered.

“Who?”

“The professors. The journalists. The visitors. They come with cameras and questions. They ask where it is. They ask whose it is. They ask whether we are ashamed.” He spat gently into the gravel. “As if a village can be ashamed for seven hundred years of dust.”

“You believe the skull was stolen?”

He lifted the lantern. Its weak amber light touched the carved stone and died there.

“I believe,” he said slowly, “that the dead do not enjoy being corrected.”

A wind passed through the cypresses.

I ought to have smiled. In another place, among colleagues, with wine and light and the protection of irony, I might have repeated his sentence as rustic superstition. But there, before that stone, beneath that moon, with the poet’s name cut into the dark, the words entered me like a needle.

The old man looked at me more closely.

“You are one of them?”

“A scholar.”

“That is what I said.”

He turned as if to leave, but after a few steps stopped.

“You love him?” he asked.

The question was absurd, and therefore exact.

“I have studied him many years.”

“No,” said the custodian. “I asked if you love him.”

I could not answer.

He nodded, as though my silence had been sufficient.

“Then be careful. It is dangerous to love the dead. They cannot love us back, so they do something worse.”

“What?”

“They let us imagine they do.”

He left me then, the lantern bobbing beside him like a small, failing soul.

I remained until the cold became unbearable.

That night I took a room in a small inn whose walls smelled of woodsmoke and damp plaster. The shutters rattled in their frames. Somewhere below, dishes clinked, chairs scraped, a woman laughed too sharply, and then all domestic sounds withdrew. I sat at a narrow desk beneath a crucifix and attempted to write notes, but each sentence seemed foolish. I had come to compose an essay on Petrarch’s divided remains, perhaps even an elegant meditation on authorship, identity, and the violence of posterity. Yet the page resisted me. The ink looked blacker than ink should look.

At last I opened my worn copy of the Canzoniere.

How many nights had I taken comfort in those poems? Comfort — though they are not comforting. They are restless, fevered, bright with pain. Petrarch does not heal longing; he polishes it until it shines like a blade. He teaches sorrow to speak with courtesy. He builds a chapel inside desire and kneels there, not knowing whether he worships God, Laura, poetry, or himself.

I read until the letters blurred.

Then I heard it.

Not a sound exactly. A pressure.

A faint scratching from within the wall.

I raised my head. The room was still. The crucifix hung motionless. The lamp flame trembled. I listened.

Again: scratch, pause, scratch.

Mice, I told myself. Stone houses are old. Autumn drives small creatures inward. There is nothing in the wall but a mouse.

But then the scratching changed.

It became slower.

Deliberate.

Not the random fret of claws, but the patient tracing of something hard against plaster, as though a fingernail — or a tooth — were writing from the other side.

I stood so quickly that the chair struck the floor behind me.

“Who is there?” I demanded.

The absurdity of speaking to a wall did not occur to me until afterward.

The scratching ceased.

I waited, my breath shallow, my ears filled with the thick pulse of my own blood.

Then, from somewhere very near the headboard, there came a sigh.

It was not the sigh of the living. It had no warmth in it. It was the release of air from a sealed cavity, a sound like a tomb being opened by degrees.

I did not sleep.

By morning I had convinced myself that exhaustion had magnified ordinary noises. Dawn restored the village to postcard innocence. Women opened shutters. A man swept the steps of a shop. The church bell rang, and pigeons rose in a gray flutter from the roofline. The hills were washed in a tender mist. The world had resumed its conspiracy of normalcy.

I returned to the tomb in daylight.

A small group had gathered there: two visitors, a priest, and a younger man from the university whom I recognized from correspondence. His name was Bellini — not the leader of the examination, but one of those useful lesser scholars who carry instruments, arrange permissions, and know far more than official reports admit. He greeted me with professional warmth, though his eyes were tired.

“You came after all,” he said.

“I could not stay away.”

“No one can, it seems. The wrong skull has made him more famous than the right one ever could.”

“That is a cruel sentence.”

“History is a cruel editor.”

We walked a little apart from the others.

“Tell me plainly,” I said. “What do you believe happened?”

Bellini glanced toward the tomb.

“The skull is not Petrarch’s. That much seems clear. Female, likely older. The rest of the skeleton is more plausible. Height perhaps remarkable. Certain injuries correspond intriguingly with biographical evidence. But the head…” He gave a dry little laugh. “The head has betrayed us.”

“Could it have been switched in 1873?”

“Possibly. Or earlier. Tombs attract hands. Devotion, theft, carelessness — all leave similar traces after enough centuries.”

“And Petrarch’s true skull?”

“Lost. Hidden. Destroyed. Displayed in some private cabinet by men who called themselves admirers.” He paused. “Or perhaps it is nearby.”

“Nearby?”

“Things taken from tombs often do not travel as far as legends do.”

He said no more, but I felt the sentence continue inside me.

Nearby.

That afternoon, I visited Petrarch’s house. I walked through rooms arranged for memory, rooms too neat to be truthful. There were objects, manuscripts, portraits, the furniture of reverence. But I had the strange impression that the house was less a dwelling than an apology. It offered the visitor a life made orderly by display, while the tomb below kept muttering its contradiction.

In one room hung a portrait of the poet: solemn, red-robed, laureled, his profile grave and inward. The face was familiar. Too familiar. The long nose, the composed lips, the gaze turned toward an invisible thought. I stood before it, suddenly angry.

“Is this you?” I whispered. “Or another skull?”

A guide in the doorway gave me a concerned look, and I moved on.

That evening the rain began.

It fell softly at first, a delicate whisper over roof tiles and cypress boughs. By nightfall it had thickened into a steady, mournful descent. Water ran along the lanes like black silk. The stones shone. The whole village seemed varnished in grief.

I was alone in my room when the scratching returned.

This time it did not come from the wall.

It came from inside my valise.

I stared at the leather case lying beside the bed. It had been closed since afternoon. The sound came again: a dry scrape, then a small hollow knock.

I approached with the careful, ridiculous courage of a man who knows he is afraid and is ashamed of it. My hand shook as I unfastened the straps.

Inside were my shirts, my notes, my book, and nothing else.

No creature. No movement.

But on top of my folded linen lay a fragment of bone.

It was no larger than a coin, curved, yellowed, porous, unmistakable.

I did not touch it.

My first thought was not terror, but outrage — the scholarly mind defending itself with procedure. Someone had placed it there. A prank. A warning. A grotesque invitation. Bellini? The custodian? Some villager weary of visitors? But the room had been locked. The window latched. The innkeeper had not entered; I had kept the key.

I bent closer.

Upon the inner curve of the fragment, in markings too fine to have been cut by any modern hand, were three letters:

L A U.

Laura.

No — not even that. Only the beginning of her name. The unfinished invocation. The wound interrupted.

I backed away until my shoulders struck the wall.

The rain beat harder.

For a long while I stood there, unable to decide whether to flee the room or guard the fragment from whatever had delivered it. At last I wrapped it in a handkerchief and placed it on the desk beside the crucifix. Then, compelled by a force I will not name, I opened my notebook and began to write.

What emerged was not an essay.

It was a confession, though not mine.

I wrote: They have given me another head, but I have worn many.

The sentence came with such violence that the pen tore the paper.

I wrote again.

The lover’s head. The scholar’s head. The crowned head. The penitent head. The head bowed before God. The head lifted toward Laura. The head posterity carved for me from its own hunger.

My hand moved faster.

Do not ask where my skull has gone. Ask where my face was when I lived. Ask whether any man who loves an image keeps his own countenance. Ask whether the poet is not always decapitated by praise.

I dropped the pen.

The room had grown colder. The lamp dimmed though it was full of oil. The fragment of bone lay beside the crucifix like a second, smaller relic.

Then I heard weeping.

It came from the hallway.

I opened the door.

The corridor was empty, lit only by a weak bulb that flickered in its wire cage. The sound came from below. A woman’s weeping, low and controlled, not the open sobbing of fresh grief but the ancient rhythm of someone who has wept so long that sorrow has become a form of breathing.

I descended the stairs.

The inn was dark. No one sat in the dining room. The hearth had collapsed into embers. Rain tapped at the windows with innumerable fingers.

The weeping came from outside.

I stepped into the lane.

At once the rain soaked my hair and coat. The village was nearly invisible, its lamps blurred in wet halos. Yet I saw, at the end of the street, a figure in pale garments moving toward the churchyard.

I followed.

She did not hurry. Her dress — if dress it was — clung to her form as mist clings to stone. I could not see her face. Her head was bowed beneath a veil or loosened hair. She moved with the dreadful certainty of one who knows her destination because she has walked to it for centuries.

At the tomb she stopped.

“Madonna?” I called.

She turned.

Her face was not decayed. That would have been mercy. Nor was it beautiful in any human sense. It was unfinished. It seemed composed of several faces remembered badly: the smooth brow of a painted saint, the hollow eyes of a death mask, the mouth of a woman about to speak a name she has forgotten. Rain passed through her and struck the stone behind.

“Where is he?” she asked.

The voice was both young and impossibly old.

I could not answer.

“Where is the one who called me into death before I died? Where is the one who made my name a ladder and climbed it toward himself? Where is the one who loved me so purely he never let me be flesh?”

“Laura,” I whispered.

At the name, the cypresses shuddered though there was no wind.

She lifted one hand and touched the tomb.

“They opened him,” she said. “They searched for his face. They found mine.”

“Yours?”

She smiled. It was an expression of such tenderness and accusation that I felt my heart contract.

“Not my skull. Do not be literal. Literal men are grave robbers of mystery. But mine, yes. The head of the beloved. The head of the imagined woman. The head he carried in himself until it replaced his own.”

The rain fell through her open palm.

“He did not love you?” I asked, though I knew the question was foolish.

“He loved what longing made of me. He loved the wound because the wound sang. And yet—” Her voice softened. “And yet there was love in it. Do not make him smaller than his sin. He suffered too.”

The tomb seemed darker under her hand.

“Why am I here?” I asked.

“Because you also have mistaken study for resurrection.”

I wanted to deny it.

But I thought of the years spent with dead men’s letters. I thought of the tenderness I had given to pages and withheld from the living. I thought of the women whose voices I had admired most when they were safely textual, safely distant, safely unable to ask anything of me. I thought of how often I had preferred the dead because they could be arranged.

“What do you want?” I said.

She pointed toward the church.

“Return what was given.”

“The bone?”

“The beginning of the name.”

I ran back through the rain, seized the handkerchief from my desk, and returned to the tomb. The figure waited, pale against the blackness, neither patient nor impatient, but inevitable.

I placed the fragment upon the stone.

For a moment nothing happened.

Then the fragment began to tremble.

A sound rose from the tomb — not loud, but vast. It was the sound of pages turning in a sealed library. The sound of quills scratching in empty rooms. The sound of breath caught before a sonnet’s final line. Beneath it, deeper, came another sound: a man weeping.

The stone before me darkened with rain.

Or with ink.

Letters appeared across its surface, not carved but wetly shining, forming and dissolving too quickly to read. Latin, Italian, phrases of prayer, scraps of verse, confessions erased by water as soon as they were born. I saw one sentence remain longer than the rest:

I made of absence an idol, and it answered me with my own voice.

Then the tomb cracked.

Not greatly. Not with the violence of an earthquake. A single line opened along the edge of the stone, thin as a hair, black as the pupil of an eye. From within came a breath warm enough to steam in the cold rain.

The figure of Laura bent toward the opening.

“Francesco,” she said.

The name was not accusation now. Nor was it forgiveness. It was recognition, which is more terrible than both.

From the crack emerged a whisper.

I cannot prove that I heard it. I cannot say whether it entered the ear or the conscience. But I know the words.

“Give me back my face.”

Laura turned to me.

“You cannot,” she said. “No one can. That is the mercy.”

She laid her translucent hand upon the stone once more.

“Let him be headless. Let him be unfinished. Let no image close him. Let no scholar complete what death has opened.”

The crack sealed.

The letters vanished.

The bone fragment dissolved into rainwater, leaving on the tomb only a pale stain shaped, for one instant, like a laurel leaf.

Then she was gone.

I do not know how long I remained there. At dawn, the custodian found me kneeling beside the tomb, soaked, shivering, my hands stained with mud or ink. He helped me to my feet without surprise.

“You saw her,” he said.

I looked at him.

He crossed himself.

“Some see the poet. Some see the woman. The unfortunate see both.”

“Has this happened before?”

He looked toward the hills, where morning had begun to loosen the dark from the vineyards.

“Signore,” he said, “do you think a wrong skull enters a poet’s grave by accident?”

I left Arquà that day.

I did not write the essay I had planned. The journals would not have accepted what I had to say, and rightly so. Scholarship has its necessary decencies. It must not tremble too visibly before the abyss.

Yet I have never again looked upon a portrait of Petrarch without unease.

The face is always too calm.

The laurel sits too neatly upon the brow. The eyes gaze outward with an authority I no longer trust. I think of the opened tomb, the female skull, the missing head, the body lying faithful beneath centuries of admiration. I think of the scholar’s desire to reconstruct a face from fragments, to make the dead available, visible, manageable. I think of Laura, whose name was made immortal at the cost of her unknowability. I think of Petrarch, who longed so beautifully that longing itself became his monument.

And I think of the old custodian’s warning.

It is dangerous to love the dead.

For they cannot love us back.

They can only lend us their faces until, one night, in some rain-black village of the soul, we discover that the face we have cherished was never theirs, and that beneath our own careful learning, beneath our reverence, beneath our polished words, something headless waits in the tomb, whispering forever:

Give me back my face.

Every Friday, I meet a member of the British Fantasy Society and peer deep into their soul (or, at least, a form they filled out). Let's head for gothic Austria to have a cup of tea with Bronte Rowan, who got here via fairytales, Sailor Moon, and Lestat, and who's probably listening to a bit of Dolly right now.

https://britishfantasysociety.org/meet-bronte-rowan/

#horror #gothic #gothicfiction #writers #writing #books #creativity #creativetoots

Great New Gothic Romances You Should Definitely Read

Love an atmospheric vibe and a dark story that involves romantic love? Then one of these 6 great new gothic romances will be for you!
https://bookriot.com/great-new-gothic-romances-you-should-definitely-read/

#KissingBooks #RomanceErotica #darkromance #gothicfiction #gothicromance

Which reminds me...

We'll meet at the cemetery (aka on Zoom) THIS SATURDAY!

Tix still available, and they cover access to the live event as well as recordings of everything you might've missed to, y'know, go on that hot date or something: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/writing-the-occult-love-and-death-tickets-1977504239413

#writers #writing #books #reading #horror #darkfantasy #death #mortality #love #romance #darkromance #gothicromance #gothic #gothicfiction #gothictales #wutheringheights

📚 This House Will Feed by: Maria Tureaud

County Clare, 1848: In the scant few years since the potato blight first cast its foul shadow over Ireland, Maggie O'Shaughnessy has lost everything—her entire family and the man she trusted with her heart. Toiling in the Ennis Workhouse for paltry rations, she can see no futur...

https://bookblabla.com/book/this-house-will-feed

@bookstodon

#books #reading #libraries #fiction #gothicfiction #historical #generalfiction #horror

My Fiction: The Full List

I’m best known for my eldritch family drama novels, but I am also a multigenre author published with big and small presses, as well as independently published.

If you’re wondering about the range of long and short fiction I have released and available, let me take you through it all! Click on a heading below to jump to that section, so you’re checking out the books you’re interested in, or discovering new content from me that you have yet to read!

1. Pagham-on-Sea Novels
2. Contemporary Novels
3. Gothic Dark Fantasy
4. Horror

I’ve got a lot out, and a lot available!

Pagham-on-Sea Novels

You can grab the trilogy of novels right now; Canelo has reissued the first two, and the third is available wide release (still self-published). You can check out the main series by clicking on the titles of the books, below.

The Crows – Thirteenth – The Day We Ate Grandad

These novels can be read in any order, but the chronological order is displayed above. I have had readers recommend The Day We Ate Grandad as a standalone to Anne Rice tumblr communities, for the washed-up Lestat (eldritch horror edition) similarities. I have had readers begin with Thirteenth, and others with The Crows.

The Crows is Ricky Porter’s story, Thirteenth follows Katy’s coming-of-age drama, and The Day We Ate Grandad is the story of Wes.

Contemporary Novels

Birds of a Feather with bonus holiday short story, First Christmas, is a novel set on a council estate where Carrie is being stalked by her ex-boyfriend, her anxiety is off the charts, and her new best friend has just introduced her to their ex, a self-employed builder/handyman who is the only one in his shady family with a legitimate business. If Guy Ritchie wrote a romcom with asexual rep.

I wrote this one as an AU for THE CROWS, as a way to reimagine the characters if they had lived without magic and monsters. I really enjoyed the characters as they appear in this novel, which is a standalone, and I may turn it into a series.

Best Friends Bury Bodies is full of melodrama, mysteries, secrets, lies, and murder, with a queer and polyamorous cast.

It’s a love letter to Midsomer Murders, bisexual midlife crises, and second chances. It is a standalone, fast-paced, character-driven novel that I really enjoyed writing and revising, and is my first release of 2026.

I love murder mysteries, especially MIDSOMER MURDERS, but I’ve always loved the cast of characters they come with more than the murder plot itself in some cases. This is an ode to those side characters, the wild side plots that are uncovered with little follow-up on their wider impact, and the absolutely batshit thngs that happen in the third act.

Gothic Dark Fantasy

Yelen & Yelena is a Gothic Dark Fantasy in a queernormative fantasy world, based on Beauty & the Beast. It features monster sex, aromantic bisexual MCs, rot plague, and a sapphic riff on Orpheus & Eurydice subplot.

Perfect for fans of hopepunk, sporror, dark Gothic fantasy, and monster-loving.

This is a standalone novel; I’m not planning on anything that follows up with the characters in this one. I do, however, plan on writing more in this world, and I have a number of other fairytales that I’d like to play with! There will be crossover in terms of locations, history, references, and even a few minor characters. All the stories will be standalones (at least that is the current idea!)

Bone Puppets is a short Dark Fantasy story, originally written in 4 parts as creative responses to a reading challenge (#AScareADay, 2025). The 4 parts were revised and edited into a cohesive story, and its current form.

It’s a tale of sex magic, folk horror, and necromancy, set during an alternative history WWI.

Bone Puppets is only currently available via my Ko-Fi, Itch, and website shops. It is one of my favourite shorts, and I really liked the characters. I think this could also be developed into something longer, but for now, it will remain a standalone short story with a limited release.

Horror

You will find my short story, Along the Xylophone Road, in this collection of body horror tales from Black Hare Press. The collection is curated by Bernardo Villela, and edited by Dean Shawker.

My story is about a revenant, dragging itself along a set of train tracks in a desert, looking for the long-distance lover they never got to meet in person before the end of the world.

I may look at re-releasing this story when I get my rights back for it, or perhaps submitting it elsewhere as a reprint. I do really like it, so it’s one I will be offering Ko-Fi members, and possibly monthly Newsletter subscribers, too.

The Snow Child is a supernatural horror short story, set in a grieving rural village during WWI. It features changelings, fae, and body horror. We follow 2 POVs; one is an autistic-coded child, Alice, praying for her dead brother’s return and that her father never comes back; the other is a guilt-ridden shepherd, Sol, who pressured his conscientious-objector son onto the front line, where he was killed. Both of them face the strange children who appear in a June blizzard, and both bear responsibility for the children’s arrival.

I wrote this short story for Books of Horror‘s June Pride book box, and released it later as a standalone. If you’re after a short, grim, grief horror with macabre supernatural elements and body horror, this is the one!

The Sound of Darkness can be found in an anthology, F is for Fear, published by Red Cape Publishing. It has been a featured story on Mike Dark’s YouTube channel, and an Eldritch Girl podcast episode, and can be bought as a standalone short. It’s a creepy tale of a man overcoming his childhood fear of the dark, based upon his supernatural experiences of growing up on the Jubilee Estate, Pagham-on-Sea.

I wrote this for the prompt ‘Common Fears & Phobias’ for the F is for Fear anthology (2020), and I want to explore this concept further in future Pagham-on-Sea shorts.

Overexposure is a Wes/Charlie short story, from Charlie’s POV. It can be read as a standalone, without any context or knowledge of the wider series.

A tale of addiction and obsessive spirals, in which an award-winning photographer meets a man who cannot be photographed, leading her to extremes.

Overexposure was shopped out to a few places before I decided it was best as a standalone addition to the Pagham-on-Sea universe, and published on its own. It’s my most popular short!

Folklore of Pagham-on-Sea Vol. 1 is a collection of flash fiction. All pieces are hyperlocal fictional folklore, set in Pagham-on-Sea. It was featured on Folklore Pod, and I have read excerpts on Romancing the Gothic‘s YouTube Channel. I’ve put it on sale for 99p, and it can be grabbed for free during selected Smashwords sales.

Folklore of Pagham-on-Sea Vol. 1 was always meant to be one in a series of folklore volumes, and I still intend to do a second volume. It is a very slim, quick, coffee-break read. I’ve got some ideas for more folklore to include!

The Reluctant Husband is a novelette that first appeared in The Uncanny and the Dead, an indie anthology that also featured authors Michelle Tang and Hester Steel. It was then published as a standalone, and featured on Dr Rehaminator’s Twitch stream. It is an epistolary, “dark but not dour” cosmic horror, set in Sussex in the 1930s, and part of the Pagham-on-Sea universe. No prior context or knowledge of the series is required.

I’m very proud of this novelette, and once I regained the rights, I reissued it as a standalone on wide release. This has all the elements of Gothic Horror as well as Weird Fiction; a creepy old house, occult experiments, plans within plans, and a mysterious entity known as the Watcher…

The Sussex Fretsaw Massacre is a novella which began as a standalone, and is now issued in a collection with short stories from Ricky Porter’s childhood and adolescence. It includes Gerald, a story first published in the hardback anniversary edition of The Crows, and other stories first written for my Ko-Fi members.

The novella has been read as an entry point to the series, and can still be bought as a standalone. Here, you’ll find it at the end of the collection, which is structured in chronological order.

You can find all my Ko-Fi fiction here: cmrosens-ko-fi.carrd.co

Download all the previous fiction for free as a member:

2021-2023
2024
2025

When Two Stories Share the Same Ancestry — My Thoughts on Bochica

I just finished Bochica, and wow what a ride through atmosphere, ancestry, and slow-burn tension. Before getting into the review, I have to acknowledge something: as the author of The Ordinary Bruja (coming November 4), it would feel disingenuous not to point out how these two books could be literary cousins. They both carry the pulse of Gothic storytelling, generational secrets, and complicated mother-daughter legacies—but they tell those stories in completely different ways.

That’s the beauty of creation: two writers can start from similar soil and still grow wildly different blooms. Bochica proves that originality isn’t about inventing something new; it’s about execution, voice, and perspective.

What Worked for Me

The Gothic atmosphere was stunning—slowly unfurling, full of whispers and shadowed corners. The pacing felt intentional, letting tension simmer rather than explode. I love that the story respected its time period (1920s-1930s Colombia) while still speaking to modern readers. The themes of colonial legacy, Catholic repression, and women navigating power all felt grounded and authentic.

Antonia, the main character, resonated deeply with me. Some reviewers called her passive, but I saw her as a woman shaped by her era—reflective of a world and a faith still wrestling with equality and voice. As someone raised in a culture deeply entwined with Catholicism and patriarchy, that rang true. Her acknowledgment of her mother’s flawed “protection” and the book’s reckoning with white-savior ideology gave the story real weight.

What Didn’t Fully Click

There were two small things that pulled me out of the reading experience:

• Name inconsistency — Antonia shifted between calling her parents by first names and by “Mama” or “Papa.” It confused me more than once and disrupted the rhythm of her narration.
• A touch of modern language — The phrase “mental health” felt slightly anachronistic for the 1930s setting, though it didn’t ruin immersion.

And while I personally wanted a stronger crescendo near the end, I can appreciate the restraint. The ending matches the book’s deliberate pacing—quiet, reflective, and emotionally grounded.

The Reader Divide

Before finishing the book, I peeked at Goodreads reviews (curiosity got me), and the reception reminded me of what I’ve seen for The Ordinary Bruja: very polarized. You either love it or it doesn’t click. That’s the hallmark of art that dares to sit in discomfort. Bochica isn’t trying to please everyone—it’s trying to tell the truth in its own cadence.

It’s also a great reminder that reviews are subjective. I always check a reviewer’s history before deciding how much weight to give their opinion. Some readers docked stars for things that didn’t bother me at all, like tone or historical realism. For me, Bochica’s blend of realism and myth was exactly right.

Final Thoughts

Bochica is a haunting, beautifully written story for readers who crave slow-burn Gothic horror, historical depth, and emotional complexity. If you loved the tone and themes of Mexican Gothic but want something that feels more spiritually grounded in Latin American mythology, you’ll adore this one.

⭐ 4 stars — A deeply atmospheric, thought-provoking read that lingers long after the last page.

And if you find yourself craving a modern-day cousin to Bochica, with the same echoes of ancestral guilt and feminine power but set in contemporary Ohio—then pick up The Ordinary Bruja this November 1. Trust me, these two books are from the same spiritual lineage, and reading them together will make the magic even richer.

The Ordinary Bruja: Book One of Las Cerradoras Series – Johanny Ortega

Marisol Espinal has spent her life trying to disappear from her family’s whispers of magic, from the shame of not belonging, from the truth she refuses to face. She’s always wanted to be someone else: confident, capable, extraordinary.

But when strange visions, flickering shadows, and warnings written in her mother’s hand begin to stalk her, Marisol is forced to confront her deepest fear: what if she isn’t extraordinary at all? What if she’s painfully ordinary?

Yet Hallowthorn Hill doesn’t call to just anyone. And the more Marisol resists, the stronger its pull becomes. The past she’s buried claws its way back, and something in the mist is watching—waiting for her to remember.

If Marisol cannot face the truth about who she is and where she comes from, the same darkness that destroyed her ancestors will claim her, too.

Somewhere in the shadows, something knows her name.

And it’s time for Marisol to learn why.

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Edgar Allan Poe invented detective fiction, perfected the short story, and wrote "The Raven" in New York City. He walked through Greenwich Village cemeteries with Virginia, finished his only novel on Waverly Place, and spent his final years in a Fordham cottage watching his young wife die of tuberculosis. New York gave him both his greatest triumph and his deepest sorrow.
#Literature #NYCHistory #GothicFiction
https://citybeautifulblog.com/2025/09/17/edgar-allan-poe-and-new-york-the-city-of-the-raven/

"This bibliography situates Cathedral of the Drowned within Ballingrud’s evolving oeuvre and the Weird tradition. Fisher’s The Weird and the Eerie enables a reading of the drowned nave and lunar crypts as eerie systems of uncertain agency. Thacker’s Horror of Philosophy volumes frame the novel’s theology of incorporation as demonstration of the world-without-us. Ligotti and Lovecraft provide counterpoints: Lovecraft through scale, Ligotti through nihilism. Expressionist film and Gothic criticism contextualize Ballingrud’s visual style. Taken together, these sources show how Ballingrud transforms Weird lineage into Lunar Gothic, staging horror as communion within architectures that think."

https://socialecologies.wordpress.com/2025/10/02/bells-under-black-water-nathan-ballingruds-cathedral-of-the-drowned/

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Do you like supernatural thrillers?
🦇 A honeymoon in Spain. A haunted street. A secret society. The Ghouls of Calle Goya is supernatural suspense at its best. ISBN 9781068353895
Please Like & Share
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✨ The London Séance Society is a gothic mystery full of twists, secrets, and spiritual echoes. Atmospheric and immersive, though I wished for more séance action. ⭐ 4/5
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http://inivyandink.blog/2025/07/12/the-london-seance-society-a-novel/

✨ Seen Through the Phantom’s Eyes ✨
Step behind the mask…

This award-winning series reimagines Gaston Leroux’s haunting tale with a blend of historical fiction, romance, and gothic mystery. Journey with Erik—the masked genius—and the few who see the man beneath the disfigurement.

Now available in one sweeping omnibus edition:
📚 In The Eye of The Beholder
🎭 Through the Opera Glass
🌩️ In The Eye of The Storm
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Perfect for fans of love, longing, and second chances.

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I am pleased (read: over the moon) to announce that I am now represented by Jake Lovell of the Sandra Dijkstra Literary Agency. #authors #HorrorCommunity #GothicFiction

New gothic fiction for Halloween #books #writing #gothicfiction https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B0DJ9H3YTY