Lore Octobrium

Fairytales reframed in a far more sinister light... desperate mothers raising children that aren't what they seem... Gods and ancient spirits hungry to be worshipped... ghosts returning to loved ones left behind...

Lore Octobrium is a sinister collection of twenty unsettling tales that are R L Halsall's love letter to the writers Angela Carter and Tanith Lee. Gothic, unnerving and often poetic, these tales will haunt any reader for hours after reading. Fairies, selkies, and shapeshifters crawl up from these eerie narratives- yet it is human grief and terror that lurks most deep upon every page.

An excerpt from ITS MANY GIFTS:

It was with me each day, that monster, each day and every night, an old thing that had found a pit of want in my heart and settled in the comforts of its lacking. The interloper supped the fat and liquor of my last essence until I could scarcely stand without reeling on my feet like a young sailor yet unbroken by the sea.

And still I let it stay, an acquiescent host, bent waist-wise in grovelling hospitality.

Soon that wicked guest had been within me for so long that I feared a life without its presence, as though I might fall in on myself, as concave as a hand puppet when the compelling arm is drawn away.
Yet my creation had not come on the diaphanous wings of that cold beast; my existence had preceded it, untouched, then, by its evil.

My enemy was the unmaker of my life, the spindle that cut the very thread it spun with its foul spell work. But it was not until fifteen years in its service had passed that I understood this, and by then I was no longer the guileless girl that I had been in that forgotten time of before.

One night, my pale companion clambered out from the hostel it had made of me to stretch its limbs, catching, by chance, my eye in a mirror, desperately though I'd sought to avoid its gaze.

Breathing damply on my cheek, the creature ran one chill fingertip into the pan of my clavicle, as though following a length of sheet music to its end across my skin. I flinched from the unwelcome touch, and yet I yearned for such bleak intimacy, a Stockholm Syndrome of the senses.

"My dear," said my captor, gently. "You have been good to me, but you have still not offered up all that you possess."