The Inhuman Ladder

Collected for the first time and arranged into a chronological sequence which spans over six hundred years, are tales of fevered investigation into the strange and supernatural- spurred by appetites glimpsed in the cracks and fissures of history; tales of exile and estrangement, of mystery and imagination, of psychological fugues and austere spiritual ecstasies, of unraveling human nature and its transcendent aberrant manifestations, of awe and horror, of ritual and magik- from folk horror to dystopian existential terror.

In Codex of Light, the initiation ceremony commemorating a young woman’s transition into adulthood reveals a secret metaphysical history equally kindled by seemingly benign light and restless shadow. In Children of the Crimson Sun, the Catholic Church assigns a Spanish medic of the Hospitaller Knights of Malta to investigate a child purporting to speak a new Gospel of Light. In The Sorrows of Satan’s Book, a widowed film scholar searching for a lost Carl Dreyer screenplay along the northern Danish coast of Jutland, is confronted with a metaphysical mystery and murder in the heart of the Scandinavian midsummer. In A Haunting in Miniature, a village in the Moravian region of the Czech Republic is shaken by a series of ghostly visitations. In Horrill Hill hunters become the haunted in a rudderless American dystopia seemingly engulfed by endless night. In The Liminal Void, the ghosts of three martyred women inhabiting a single body, are assigned by their collapsing Kratocratic pagan regime to investigate a crime against humanity in a secluded village stationed at the end of time.

Appearing for the first time, this volume also includes a twenty-five thousand word novella entitled: An Invitation to a Conjuring, which concerns a lapsed psychiatrist’s investigation of a children’s retreat in the Austrian mountains in 1936.

The wounds of time mark our minds and bodies with cartographies of experience both real and imagined.