Night Babies

The haunting new folk horror novel from Lucie McKnight Hardy

''All my fears have vanished, and I realise now that my dreams were not nightmares but a sign of what was to come, how this will end. An inevitability.''

Things were looking up for Astrid Aspden and her partner, Kit, until their house flooded. With Astrid''s first solo art exhibition just weeks away, her paintings are ruined and excitement has turned to despair.

She is thrown a lifeline when her best friend Flora invites her to stay in a run-down chapel she and her partner, Sim, are renovating in the Brecon Beacons. As Astrid and Kit settle into their new surroundings to salvage her work, they soon learn about the unsettling history of the chapel and what lies beneath the nearby reservoir.

As the weeks go by, tensions simmer between Astrid and Flora as sour memories flare up from their teenage past and deep wounds are laid bare from an ill-fated school trip to Florence. Her relationship with Kit begins to fray as the chapel and the surrounding hostile beauty of the valley begin to intrude on their lives.

Astrid throws herself into her work but the longer she spends in the chapel the more she begins to notice things: handprints on her paintings, shadowy figures reflected in the reservoir and voices whispering in the night. As the darkness of the Welsh valley closes in on Astrid, will she be able to run from the looming horror or be consumed by it?

Whether it is the past, the otherworldly, or the truth - they all haunt this menacing and claustrophobic novel.