Six books. One island. By Wolfgang Valentine.
The kettle is on.
The story
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.
The binding has held since before England had a name.
It is coming apart one crack at a time.
When
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.
Start here — Book One
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.
The saga
Six books. They are published one at a time, when each one is ready.
The prequel is set in 988 AD and can be read at any point. Begin with The Thing in the Net.
Sign up to be told
One email per finished book, sent on the day it goes on sale.
The author will not be sending you anything else. No newsletter. No marketing. No discount codes. No tote-bag offers. That is the whole arrangement.
If you have read the book and would like to write to the author, you may do so at the address here. 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.