THE WYRD RETURNS

The dead have been keeping a record.England, 2037. When Dr. Ellison Vane - criminologist, reluctant scholar of the mythological substrate of crime - receives a Home Office file marked CATEGORY UNKNOWN, he finds himself looking at eleven suspended bodies, eight feet in the air, eyes turned to absolute black. Every one of them a predator the justice system chose not to punish adequately. Every one of them now held in a clarity from which no medicine can retrieve them.The land is collecting.Guided by Edwin Thatch - a cunning man on a Northumberland hill who has been tending the old compact for thirty years - Vane begins to understand what is happening and why. The Anglo-Saxon gods did not depart when the churches rose. They descended. Into the paths and the stones and the deep ground of England, patient as geology, keeping the full record of everything the human institutions had refused to address. The Wild Hunt is not mythology. It is a reckoning with a current case file.As the acceleration begins and the numbers climb into the hundreds - across England, across Germany, across the old Germanic territories - Vane must confront not only what the reckoning is, but what it demands of him personally. Because the land watches everyone. And the question the winter of 2037 places before every person who lives on English ground is: what have you done with what you know?THE WYRD RETURNS is a folk horror novel unlike any other: philosophically fearless, formally daring, written in a prose that begins in academic precision and evolves - over the course of the novel - into the Germanic root-stock of the language itself, the old English stripped of its Norman overlay, as if the land is reclaiming the tongue that always named it best.Fans of Andrew Michael Hurley, Alan Garner, Thomas Ligotti, and the visionary tradition of British weird fiction will find here something that honours all of them and exceeds any single one. Justice delayed is not justice denied. Not always. Sometimes it is merely justice patient.

Pages: 323, Paperback, Independently published