Folk Horror
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A nurse returns from wartime France to bury her father in a Shropshire village, where a children’s singing game on the green carries instructions she has been following all her life.
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King Richard III sends Richard Taillour west to investigate a seized merchant vessel and the disappearance of two royal commissioners. What he finds aboard the Sint Marie in Axmouth harbour defies all record.
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A stranded traveller takes shelter at an inn and hears the innkeeper’s dark tale of a murdered duke, a vast and unknowable cook, and a feast that no guest could forget. Based on the #vss365 prompt #divine
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Five children play a counting game on Bodmin Moor above Minions. When the rhyme turns cruel and one of them dies, the survivors bury what happened. Twenty years later, those old words return.
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Chosen, blessed, sky-called. The village sings Pegwyche’s name as she rises toward the floating Rookery of Ninelast. But going-up is not a marriage. Mister Talp, the blind mole groundskeeper, knows what it really is.
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A tithe surveyor arrives in an Oxfordshire parish in 1843 to map every field and account for every acre. The older records name a settlement called Slyne Birch, cleared by a local lord four centuries earlier. The dead do not want remembrance. They want someone to finish their paperwork.
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In 1780s Shropshire, a parish midwife watches a man called Odd Man Dodd move between three townships. Three people die. The children learn a rhyme. Nobody asks where the words came from.
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In St Barrow’s, Mistress Grimshaw’s charity opens her purse only for those who beg aloud before the parish. Judith Cox, widowed and cornered, finds a way to make the purse answer the want it knows best.
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Ralph Travers, a curate in Exeter, struggles with his conscience after inadvertently making the Devil, Bucky, known to children through a rhyme. As children start disappearing, he faces the consequences of his actions.
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In a series of intertwined tales, women at fairs confront the consequences of seeking love through an ancient ash charm. Each one learns that desires shape their fates, often leading to regret.