Mummy Brown

Felix is a starving artist in the truest sense: freezing in an Earls Court studio, burning his own stretcher bars for warmth, and watching his dreams dissolve in the winter fog. That is, until he meets Anita.Anita is a patron from a different era. She offers Felix a sanctuary in her Cheyne Walk mansion-a house that smells of tuberose and ancient dust, guarded by a valet who moves like a panther and a housekeeper carved from stone. She offers him a studio bathed in perfect north light. She offers him the Archive: a collection of forbidden pigments-Mummy Brown, Scheele's Green, Lead White-that no modern artist dares to use.But Anita doesn't want a portrait. She wants a resurrection.As Felix begins to paint, he discovers that these pigments don't just capture the light; they alter reality. A painted door can be opened; a painted fire can burn a critic alive. But the magic extracts a heavy toll. With every masterpiece, Felix withers, his youth siphoned away to feed the woman in the wedding dress who refuses to age.Trapped in a house that is slowly sealing itself off from the world, Felix must uncover the true name of his muse before he is reduced to a husk. He must paint the truth, or become just another layer of varnish in Anita's collection of stolen souls.Mummy Brown is a visceral, Faustian gothic horror about the price of ambition and the monsters hiding behind the canvas.

Pages: 222, Paperback, Independently published