HorrorFolk Horror
The Horse and the Plague
By Philip Stengel
An Edinburgh scholar exhumes the crowned bones of the Black King in a North Sea hamlet and opens a breach that returns the Nuckelavee, plague breath, and old rules no proof can survive.
Amazon sets current price, formats, availability, and delivery. This site holds no affiliate links and earns nothing from a purchase.
About the book
The story
A storm tears open an old kirk on the North Sea, and the ground spits up bones that were never meant to see daylight again.
Elspeth MacBride, an Edinburgh scholar with a reputation to rebuild and grief she refuses to name, comes to the coastal hamlet of Dunmoore to verify an impossible claim: the unearthed skeleton of Dubhghall, the Black King, buried in shame and marked by a crown-shaped wound. The village expects an academic. What it gets is a witness.
Because the exhumation is not just archaeology. It is a breach.
People start coughing brine. Blood comes out dark and stringy. The air tastes like low tide trapped in a cellar. Whispers arrive in the voices of the dead, precise enough to split a person open from the inside. The locals have a name they will not say above a whisper: Nuckelavee, the skinless rider that comes in with the sea-frets and brings sickness on its breath.
The old rules return fast: salt, iron, running water, and one command that matters more than prayer. Do not answer it when it calls.
The Horse and the Plague is atmospheric folk horror about buried kings, coastal guilt, and the brutal cost of "proof" when the past is hungry.
If this one pulls
Related books
HorrorFolkloric Horror
Baron Samedi: The Last Rite
At the crossroads of New Orleans, a widow’s forbidden rite awakens Baron Samedi, and every bargain with the dead comes due.
HorrorSupernatural Horror
The Light We Leave Behind
A grieving painter in Marrow Bay discovers she can paint the lost back into the world, but every return takes a name, a voice, or a memory she cannot replace.
HorrorCoastal Gothic Horror
The Midnight Sculptor of Hollow Creek
A woman returning to a fogbound Nova Scotia fishing town finds the dead staged as maritime effigies, each one forcing Hollow Creek to read its own buried guilt.
Amazon: The Midnight Sculptor of Hollow Creek (opens in a new tab)
HorrorGothic Supernatural Horror
The Unquiet
A Salem psychiatrist survives a violent crash and returns to her mother's old house with something watching from the shadows, only to learn the haunting does not want the house. It wants her bloodline.
Ready to read
Open The Horse and the Plague on Amazon.
The listing carries the sample, the current price, and every available format.