The Hollow Covenant: Book I — Summons

1881. A dying coast. A hunger older than God. Dr. Elias Crane is finished. Once a respected psychiatrist, now disgraced after a patient died under his care, he has nothing left to lose when the summons arrives: come to Ashworth Asylum, on the remote cliffs of the Welsh coast, and explain why seven patients are dead. Each of them carved the same symbol into their left forearm before they died - a circle, seven uneven segments, a single vertical line. Each death was ruled a suicide. None of them should have been possible. What Crane finds at Ashworth is worse than murder. The asylum was built on something. Something ancient. Something patient. The staff leave bread and salt at the basement door. The chaplain has stopped believing in God - but not in what waits beneath the chapel. And in the lowest cell, a mute patient draws the same picture again and again: seven figures, a door, and a man with a notebook who looks exactly like Crane. The deeper he digs, the more he understands. The symbol is not madness. It is a blueprint. The deaths are not an ending. They are a preparation. And the reason Crane was chosen has nothing to do with his medical training - and everything to do with the blood in his veins. It is not evil. It is hungry. And hunger has no morality. The Hollow Covenant: Book I - The Summons is the first volume of a Victorian Gothic horror serial steeped in slow-burn dread and cosmic terror. For readers who like their atmosphere thick, their asylums haunted, and their monsters older than the words we use to name them.

Pages: 214, Paperback, Independently published