Horror

1865. Coal lies beneath Scratch Moss Hall and Lord Henry Brody is determined to get to it. But something else lurks below, something dark and evil.

1905. Reverend George Ackman has never known such godless people as those of Scratch Moss. But if not God, what do they believe in?

1945. Arthur works for the Coal Commission, visiting privately-owned pits ahead of their nationalisation. On his visit to Scratch Moss, he finds only misery and death.

1985. The miners have lost. Thatcher reigns supreme. And in the shattered community of Scratch Moss, rumours resurface about Red Clogs, a terrible presence in the land below.

2025. Divorced, fifty-something writer Joe returns to his hometown of Scratch Moss for the funeral of his father. Soon the memories of Joe’s teenage years, and the horror that blighted the community, come flooding back

A devastating, five-timeline tale centred on a community first invigorated, then devastated by the coal mining industry in the most original folk horror novel of the year.

Praise for Scratch Moss

‘A creepy folk horror set in an old mining town which moves between generations to slowly build a picture of a town complicit in some terrible things. Really loved this one!’ Sarah Pinborough

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Eleven years ago, an inbred, cannibalistic family lived in the tiny hamlet of Hanow in West Cornwall, consisting of three tumbledown cottages and a pub. Nestled in the sprawling wild countryside before the cliff edge, miles away from the nearest village or town, the family dwelled in squalor, their properties in Hanow passed down from generation to generation.

The pub hadn’t been a pub for many years. Not officially, anyway. A cousin of the family who owned a B and B in the neighbouring town of Penzance occasionally sent tourists their way, especially if they were young and pretty. Those that tackled the fifteen-mile hike along the cliff path to Hanow were rewarded with a pub lunch and a pint.

Most of them ended up as the pub lunch.

But, that is all in the past. Hanow has since undergone a makeover, courtesy of ambitious couple Brian and Jenny Cartwright, the new landlord and landlady of the infamous pub, The Dirty Swallow. They have bought the entire hamlet and have big business plans.

Three old school friends are doing the fifteen-mile hike from Penzance to Hanow.

A father and his estranged teenaged daughter are also making the pilgrimage for a ploughman’s and a pint.
These five innocents are about to stumble straight into Hell.

Although The Dirty Swallow could be labelled a sequel to Suffer Hard, in that the events in this novella take place eleven years after those in Suffer Hard, it can absolutely be read as a standalone story.

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