books
Threads of Wyrd: think E.M. Forster's Maurice + a bit of The Ghost & Mrs. Muir + the weirdness of Wilkie Collins. Gothic romance with glimmers of magic. Potentially nonlinear storytelling.
The Kraken and The Canary is focused on seer and landlord Paul Apollyon, eventual father figure of the found family who finds its home in The Shuck. But when Paul is young and still tapped into his premonitions, things are far more boring. Then a dashing stranger bursts into his taproom and asks to hide in the cellar. Paul can't say no; he even has a blush-inducing vision about the devilish newcomer. It all draws him into a plot to get two women out of Cromer so they can, more or less, marry. Here's the start of his own love story, although Alastair Gow is anything but straightforward.
Of Flint and Fortune / coming 2025
13 months of idyll have transpired since reformed petty criminal Alastair Gow moved in with Paul Apollyon. When de facto marital bliss gives way to preternatural weirdness, unflappable Paul is unwilling to let Alastair face his past alone. First, a regular customer delivers words of caution from a ghost. Second, Paul has a spate of ominous visions. Third, the new maid finds a dead crow hanging from the pub’s front door.
As though that’s not enough to be dealing with, a former colleague of Alastair’s arrives without warning, maintaining Alastair owes him. The new chaos seems connected to a past good deed—Alastair can admit to the deed itself. He just doesn’t want to own what it enabled him to do. As he and Paul find themselves forced into an absurd search for lost smugglers’ loot, proper vulnerability proves more daunting than prospective peril. But Alastair doesn’t expire from telling the truth, and Paul is as steadfast as ever. Then, another poor corvid serves as a sinister message... and the man who leaves it will stop at nothing to have Alastair for himself.
Of Valentines and Visions / coming 2025
In Like Silk Breathing, aura-sensing, self-medicating empath Tom Apollyon comes to work at his uncle's pub in Cromer. While on a late-night walk with an ominous intent, he meets the urbane selkie Theo Harper. But... because what else would be the case when you meet an intriguing fellow... Theo is involved with Tom's ex, Cambridge toff David Mills. Needless to say, Tom and David have a past. They don't get along well. When Theo's skin goes missing, Tom thinks he can find it himself and secure their future, David be damned. He refuses to end up like his uncle, who skulks about pining for his lost love... a mysterious man called Alastair.
The Only Story sees David Mills reckoning with his stifling past and making amends for being a bit awful to everybody. One day, he crosses paths with pickpocket and adept seer Lennie Campling, who is trying to escape the influence of their bigoted stepfather. Or, more accurately, Lennie steals David's wallet only to give it back. Then things take an even more chaotic turn when David knocks out Lennie's stepbrother with a wee jolt of magic. With no idea where to go for answers or safe haven, Lennie and David flee to The Shuck. There, David discovers it's unnervingly natural to slip into a life of witchery... and Lennie finds both a toff-ish lover and the accepting family they've never had.
Unfair Winds is the one where everyone seems to be adjusting to ideas of love and loss, and a newly (re)haunted Shuck. Paul can't see or sense the ghost of his dead husband, but he's the only person who absolutely cannot. Meanwhile, David plots a supposedly noble murder with the help of said ghost; Tom and Theo grapple with new conflicts in their own relationship that have nothing to do with specters; Lennie wants to know what's being kept from them and why. In theory, a haunting may be the tamest of problems anybody faces! Besides, Alastair really is just trying to help everybody, but if only love and being loved came as easily as magic seems to.
