Isle of the Bound · Book 1
A Novel of the Isle of Man · Wolfgang Valentine
The Norse goddess of the dead is coming loose under the island, and the Sheldons put the kettle on.
In 1988, fifteen-year-old Jessica Sheldon crosses a grey sea for a funeral and inherits a wooden chest.
The thing inside the chest has waited a thousand years for someone with her blood to open it.
All six books were written before this one went on sale.
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In 1988, fifteen-year-old Jessica Sheldon crosses a grey sea for a funeral and inherits a wooden chest.
She has not spoken to her father in six years. She does not expect the island to know her name. She feels it anyway, humming up through the soles of her trainers the moment she steps off the ferry.
The thing inside the chest has waited a thousand years for someone with her blood to open it.
A chest the size of a small suitcase, dark wood banded with iron, carved all over with spirals around a three-legged mark. The lock was made before machines were.
The binding has held since before England had a name. It is coming apart one crack at a time.
Seven stones on the bare back of the island, in a shape that is neither a circle nor a line. A shape made for a holding.
A prologue a thousand years deep, and four years in which everything comes due.
At the foot of the island, under the rock, the death-goddess Hela is rising — grieving, tired, and ready to put the dead down. What the Sheldons inherited is the cost of keeping her bound.
August 1952. It came up in a herring net off the Calf: no larger than a duck egg, and glowing like a coal at the back of a hearth.
988 AD and 1988–1992 are years inside the story, not publication dates.
Book 1
What she inherits sings in a language no one on the island still speaks. It fails at the summer solstice. So does her childhood: the twenty-first of June is her sixteenth birthday, and the island has been saving the date.
She came home for a funeral. She did not know the inheritance had a will of its own — or that, in this family, the dead come back.
Funny in places and frightening in others, often on the same page. A complete story, and the door into a six-book saga.
For anyone who read Susan Cooper or Alan Garner as a child and has been looking for that feeling in a grown-up book ever since.
Adult mythic family fantasy set on the Isle of Man, combining Manx and Norse myth with folk-horror atmosphere. It is not extreme horror, gore-first fiction, grimdark or a romance-led novel.
A central character is fifteen turning sixteen. The book is for adult readers.
Six books. They are published one at a time, when each one is ready.
All six books were written before this one went on sale.
The prequel is set in 988 AD and can be read at any point. Begin with The Thing in the Net.
The end of the world is coming to a small island, and the Sheldons are putting the kettle on.
Wolfgang Valentine lives on the Isle of Man and is unavailable for interview.
If you have read the book and would like to write to the author, you may do so at the address below. He has agreed to read them. He has not agreed to reply. He is a slow correspondent and a slower writer and the kettle has needed boiling.
If you are a Manx reader and you have spotted an error — language, geography, custom, family-naming, anything — please write. The corrections in the next edition will be yours.