The Black Pages: Gothic Horror Collection

Some horrors are inherited.

Others are invited.

Black Pages: Gothic Horror is a collection of five independent stories steeped in grief, superstition, forbidden bargains, ancient curses and the dangerous places where love begins to resemble obsession.

Moving through fog-covered London, isolated villages, drowned marshland, storm-lashed coastlines and castles buried beneath winter, the collection returns to the foundations of Gothic horror: death, faith, loneliness, family, decaying places and the unsettling possibility that some things answer when called.

But the greatest danger is rarely that something waits in the darkness.

It is that someone desperately wants it to come closer.

In Clara, physician and lecturer Edgar loses his seven-year-old daughter to fever.

Unable to accept her death, he exhumes Clara's body and takes her into the mortuary beneath his Bloomsbury home, where years of scientific study give way to something far more dangerous. Using five panes of silvered mortuary glass and old folklore concerning mirrors and the dead, Edgar attempts to discover whether the human soul can be traced after death.

Then something appears behind Clara's reflection.

Tall. Winged. Its face hidden behind its hands.

Edgar believes he may have found a way to bring his daughter back.

His wife, Margaret, is far less certain that whatever waits inside the glass has anything to do with Clara at all.

Devotion follows Jonathan Mason, a lonely and impoverished former clerk living in Whitechapel.

Jonathan does not dream of power.

He wants to be wanted.

At a crossroads outside London, he performs a ritual using six pennies, a dead rat, his mother's wedding ring and his own blood. Something answers in the form of a beautiful woman who allows him to call her Elianor.

Jonathan believes he has finally found someone who sees him completely.

But Elianor offers neither romance nor salvation.

If Jonathan wishes to prove his devotion, he must take an innocent life.

What follows is a story about loneliness, obsession and the terrible difference between loving another person and loving what their attention allows you to believe about yourself.

In Epitaph, travelling stone-cutter Elias Wren accepts restoration work at Mournstead, an isolated estate surrounded by black fen water, leaning graves and a village that appears to fear its own churchyard.

His instructions seem simple.

Follow the family ledger.

Carve exactly what is written.

Then Elias discovers that one of the gravestones he has been commissioned to complete belongs to a man who is still alive.

The date of death is three days away.

When the inscription proves accurate, another name appears. Then another.

Elias gradually discovers that Mournstead has survived for generations through an arrangement written not only into its history, but into the names of the people who live beneath its shadow.

And at Mournstead, once something has been written in stone, refusing to carve it does not necessarily prevent it from becoming true.

Honey descends beneath an isolated lighthouse into a sea cave where a winged creature has remained chained to the rock for three hundred years.

The priests who captured her could not kill her.

So they found another use.

For generations, the village above has lowered people into the darkness beneath the lighthouse, feeding an ancient arrangement that its inhabitants have inherited without ever truly questioning what it requires.

Then a young man named Thomas is lowered into the cave during a violent storm.

He expects to meet a monster.

Instead, he finds something imprisoned.

And for the first time in centuries, the creature below is confronted not with worship, hatred or fear, but with someone capable of recognising captivity when he sees it.

Honey turns the traditional Gothic monster story inside out, asking whether monstrosity belongs to the creature in chains or to the people who have spent generations convincing themselves that sacrifice is simply tradition.

The collection closes with Wolfgang, where a wounded knight returns from war to Blackmere, the remote castle he once called home.

He expects his wife.

He expects his household.

He expects the child born during his absence.

Instead, he finds an open gate, an empty courtyard, blood in the snow and a wife who refuses to explain what moves through the castle after dark.

Something has happened to their son.

Something involving a burial that did not remain final.

Behind an iron-banded nursery door, Wolfgang eventually discovers what his wife Astrid has been protecting, and is forced to confront a question far more difficult than anything he faced on the battlefield.

It is easy to raise a sword against a monster.

It is considerably harder when the monster knows you as its father.

Across all five stories, Black Pages: Gothic Horror treats Gothic horror as something deeply personal.

Dark, tragic and steeped in Gothic atmosphere, the collection blends supernatural horror, historical horror, occult terror, demonic folklore, cursed estates and creature horror with stories about the human emotions that make those horrors possible.

At its heart, Black Pages: Gothic Horror asks one question:

How much of ourselves are we willing to surrender rather than let go of something we love?

Sometimes the answer is reason.

Sometimes morality.

Sometimes faith.

And sometimes the door was never locked to keep the darkness out.

It was locked to stop us inviting it in.