#folk-horror

Wee shop update, adding my new minicomic, Nangelle Eut!

https://www.etsy.com/uk/listing/4483385017/nangelle-eut-minicomic

a short comic I drew in the dark during new year! also remember you can get all my work in digital form on my itchio!

The workshop had been silent for three days.

Clara Whitlock stood with one hand on the oak door and the other pressed flat against her own chest, as if she could quiet herself enough to hear through wood. In twenty-three years, Arthur had never worked without noise. There was always some small evidence of him: the tick of gears, the rasp of a file, the bright tap of his hammer, the little throat-clearing cough he made before leaning close to delicate work. Now there was nothing. Not even the clocks.

“Arthur,” she said.

Her breath smoked white in the narrow passage between the house and the workshop. Frost had collected on the hinges. The brass handle was so cold it bit her palm. She tried it anyway. Locked.

It had been locked since Monday morning, when Arthur had carried in a tray of tea, Mabel’s old cedar chest, and the black case of watchmaker’s tools he had not opened in years. He had kissed Clara’s forehead before going inside. Not her mouth. Her forehead, carefully, as one kisses someone already sleeping. Then he had shut the door.

The workshop had been built against the back of the house thirty years earlier, after Arthur’s first commission from the city hall. Heavy oak door, narrow windows, no proper heat. He said cold air improved precision. Warm fingers got sentimental. Warm rooms made wood swell. Cold kept everything honest. Clara had once believed this was only how craftsmen spoke when they wanted to be left alone.

She bent and looked through the keyhole. Dark. She went to the window instead.

The glass was thick with frost, but near the bottom a patch had cleared in three small ovals, as if three mouths had breathed against it from the inside. Clara wiped at the pane with her sleeve.

The carolers stood in their rows. Dozens of them.

Arthur had made the first one the winter after Mabel died. It had been no taller than their daughter, with jointed wooden hands and a painted mouth that opened when its spring turned. It did not sing then. It clicked. It bowed. It held a little paper hymnal between its fingers while Arthur sat across from it at the dining table and wound it until the key screamed.

After that came more. A boy with a wool cap. A woman with a fur muff. A parish elder. Two red-cheeked children. A whole village of painted singers, each with a hinged jaw and glass eyes and a place in Arthur’s private arrangement.

People had paid well for them at first. Banks wanted them in windows. Churches borrowed them for Advent displays. Then Mrs. Peake saw one turn its head toward her baby carriage when no one had wound it. After that, commissions slowed. Children crossed the street. Packages were left at the gate. Arthur kept building. Clara had learned not to count them.

Now every caroler faced the door. Not the window. Not the central workbench. The door. Her door.

Behind them, something pale hung from a hook near the stove pipe. Clara squinted, then stepped back so quickly her heel slid on the frozen path.

Mabel’s red velvet Christmas dress.

Clara had kept it folded in cedar for twenty-three years, wrapped with lavender and tissue, because she had not been able to throw it away and could not bear to see it. Mabel had been meant to wear it in the church pageant. She had stood in the kitchen the night before she died, missing one front tooth, singing “sleep in heavenly peace” as “sleep in heavy peace” while Clara pinned the hem. Heavy peace. Clara had laughed until Mabel laughed too.

The next afternoon, the motorcar skidded at the bridge. Arthur had not laughed again in the same voice.

Clara went back into the house. The kitchen had cooled while she was outside. Pot roast sat on the stove, gray at the edges, carrots sinking into fat. She had made it because Arthur loved it. Because one still cooked for a husband even when he had locked himself inside a room with dead things. Because meals were a form of knocking.

His plate was missing from the table.

Clara stood very still. She had set it there an hour ago. White china, blue rim, knife at the right, fork at the left. Now the place was empty except for a ring of gravy on the wood. The workshop door had not opened. She would have heard it. The hinges always complained.

She found the plate in the sink, washed clean and set upright to dry.

“Arthur?” she called toward the back hall.

No answer.

On the kitchen table, beside the salt cellar, lay Mabel’s pageant songbook. Clara did not touch it at first. The cover had gone soft with age. A little angel smiled from a wash of faded blue. Inside, the carol had been marked in three colors of pencil: Father, Child, Mother. Arthur had written her name beside the alto line.

CLARA — ENTER AFTER CHILD.

Under that, in smaller writing, he had written the same phrase three times: not enough mother.

The room made a small ticking sound. Clara turned. The parlor clock had stopped at 11:47.

She went to the drawer for the spare workshop key. Arthur had given it to her after Mabel’s funeral, placing it in her palm like a promise. No locked doors between us, he had said. Never again. The key no longer fit.

She tried until the brass cut her fingers. The lock accepted it halfway, then refused to turn, as if the inside had been changed to suit another hand.

“Arthur,” she said through the door.

This time something answered. Not a voice. A breath. One breath, drawn by many mouths.

Clara backed away. The workshop remained still. Snow fell through the dark beyond the yard, soft as ash. In the kitchen, the stopped clock held its hands at 11:47.

Then the singing began.

It started low, below melody. A bellows sound. A gear catching. Wood settling around pins. Then a child’s voice rose through the mechanism, thin and bright and exact.

“Silent night, holy night…”

Clara gripped the doorframe. The voice did not belong to memory. Memory frays. It loses the wet edges of sound. It forgets how a child breathes before a difficult note. This voice took the same little breath Mabel used to take.

“All is calm, all is bright…”

Clara moved before she decided to move. She crossed the yard in slippers and no coat. Ice burned through the soles. The snow had hardened under a crust, and each step broke it with a sound like china cracking.

The workshop glowed from beneath the door. Inside, shadows swayed.

“Arthur.”

The singing continued.

She struck the oak with both fists. “Arthur, open this door.”

The song stopped mid-word. The absence after it was worse than silence. It felt arranged.

Footsteps came from inside. Slow. Uneven. One human step, one lighter click.

“Clara?” Arthur said.

His voice was close to the door. Too close. She pictured his mouth almost touching the wood.

“Open it.”

“You’re barefoot.”

“Open the door.”

A pause.

“She came in on the third verse,” he said.

Clara pressed her bleeding fingers against the grain. “Who did?”

“You heard her.”

“Arthur.”

“I got the pitch wrong for years.” His voice trembled, but not with fear. “I thought I needed better springs. Better bellows. Ivory for the teeth. Glass with less distortion. I thought the body was the trouble.”

Something clicked beside his words. A latch tested by a careful hand.

“I was wrong,” he said. “She wasn’t waiting for my voice.”

Clara closed her eyes.

From inside the workshop, Mabel sang alone.

“Sleep in heavy peace.”

The lock opened. The door swung inward. Heat rolled over Clara’s face.

Not the clean heat of a stove. Candle heat. Breath heat. The damp warmth of a crowded church with all the windows closed.

The workshop had been emptied of ordinary work. No loose boards, no crates, no half-built commissions waiting under sheets. Everything had been cleared to the walls. Candles burned in jars along the benches. Tinsel had been nailed to the rafters. Mabel’s pageant program was pinned above the main worktable, yellowed and brittle, with her name circled in red.

The Whitlock Carolers stood in a semicircle. Their chests rose and fell. Not smoothly. Not like lungs. Their little painted ribs lifted in time, then paused, then dropped with a soft wooden knock. Hiss. Click. Silence. Hiss. Click. Silence.

On the floor, three circles had been cut into the boards. Arthur stood in one. Mabel stood in one. The third circle was empty except for Clara’s black wedding shoes, placed neatly heel to heel.

Arthur had changed.

At first she saw only his face, thinner than it had been three days ago, beard untrimmed, eyes wet with triumph and exhaustion. Then he turned slightly, and the candlelight found the brass key set into the soft place behind his left ear.

His right hand was gloved. The glove moved one finger at a time, badly.

“Clara,” he said. “You came.”

She did not answer him.

Mabel was looking at her.

Seven years old. Golden curls. Blue eyes. Red velvet dress. The hem still pinned where Clara had left it twenty-three years before. One front tooth missing. Almost.

The curls rested too perfectly against her cheeks, each one shaped like a shaving from Arthur’s lathe. Her eyes held candlelight in hard points. When she blinked, every caroler blinked one beat after her.

“Hello, Mommy,” Mabel said.

Clara’s knees loosened. Arthur reached for her, but she pulled away.

“No.”

Mabel tilted her head. “You’re late.”

The words were childish. Petulant. Familiar. Clara made a sound she would not have recognized from another woman.

Arthur stepped out of his circle and the carolers clicked all at once. He stopped immediately, face tightening with pain.

“Don’t,” Mabel said.

He obeyed.

Clara looked at the benches then. Really looked.

There were trays of teeth. Not all human. Not all adult. Locks of hair tied with thread. Tiny brass tongues. Strips of old sheet music lacquered stiff as bone. A row of mother-faces lay unfinished near the vise, each one carved from pale wood, each mouth opened in a different shape of song.

On the largest workbench sat Arthur’s ledger. Clara could read the last page from where she stood: child voice stable; father accepted; mother recognition absent; mother recognition required.

“You planned me,” she said.

Arthur’s eyes filled. “I prepared a place for you.”

“You planned me.”

“I kept her near us.” His voice broke. “Every year I got a little closer. Every Christmas she answered more. A hum. A syllable. A wrong note. This year she said your name.”

Mabel held out one small hand.

It was not flesh. The fingers were carved and jointed, each knuckle pinned in brass. The nails were painted the pale pink Clara used to dab on Mabel’s hands when she played dress-up. The palm opened toward her.

“You missed your part,” Mabel said.

The carolers inhaled. Clara felt the intake in her ribs.

“No,” she said, but the word came out shaped like the beginning of a note.

Arthur smiled then, and it was worse than any madness she could have imagined because it was full of gratitude. “I could make the voice,” he whispered. “I could make the body. I couldn’t make it know its mother.”

Mabel’s hand remained open.

The song began around them.

Not loud. Not at first. The carolers sang with polite church voices, sweet and narrow, their mouths opening in perfect measure. Arthur joined them on the father’s line. His voice caught, then settled into pitch as the key behind his ear turned once by itself.

Clara clapped her hands over her mouth.

The alto line waited. She could feel its place in the air. Empty. Exact. A chair pulled out from a table.

Mabel sang the child’s part. She sang it beautifully. She sang it wrong.

Heavy peace.

Clara lowered her hands. Arthur saw and began to cry.

The third circle seemed nearer than it had been. Clara did not remember stepping toward it. Her shoes waited on the boards. Her wedding shoes. The ones she had worn in St. Bartholomew’s with frost melting in her veil and Arthur’s hand shaking around hers.

“Don’t make me,” she said.

Mabel’s face changed. Not into a monster. That would have been easier. Her lower lip trembled. Her brow folded in the exact small crease she used to get when trying not to cry.

“Mommy,” she said, “please.”

Clara broke.

She stepped into the circle.

The workshop answered. Every gear in the room caught at once. The sound went through the floor, up her legs, into the hinges of her knees. Her pulse stumbled, missed itself, then found the rhythm waiting beneath it. Hiss. Click. Silence.

Her jaw ached.

Arthur took her left hand. His gloved fingers were hard under the cloth. Mabel took her right. Cold wood. Brass joints. Painted nails.

Clara tried to pull back. Mabel’s fingers tightened.

The child’s sleeve wrinkled under Clara’s grip. Red velvet, soft with age, real beneath her thumb. Clara could still tear free. She knew it. One hard pull would break those little wooden fingers. One hard pull would silence the voice or prove it had never been Mabel at all.

Mabel looked up at her. There was candlelight in her glass eyes. There was also fear. Clara could not tell whose fear it was.

The alto line came again.

This time Clara answered.

Her throat opened around the note. It did not feel like singing. It felt like a lock recognizing the correct key.

Arthur sobbed with relief.

The carolers swelled behind them, louder now, joyous and disciplined. Clara’s breath shortened. Something pressed against the inside of her chest, measuring her. Her teeth vibrated. Her tongue grew heavy. The note stretched through her until it found all the hollow places grief had left and filled them with brass.

She thought of Mabel at the kitchen table, velvet hem in Clara’s lap. She thought of Arthur winding the first caroler until both of them wept. She thought of the empty chair at every Christmas dinner and the terrible mercy of hearing it scrape back from the table.

Mabel leaned against her.

Clara felt no warmth from the child’s wooden head. She bent over it anyway.

When her last human thought came, it was not a prayer. It was smaller and worse.

Just this verse, she thought. Let me have just this verse.

The singing went on for three days.

At first the neighbors pretended not to hear it. The Whitlock house had always been strange in December. Arthur had always tested his machines at indecent hours. By the second night, the sound had crossed the lane and entered people’s sleep. Babies woke humming. Dogs crawled under beds. At St. Bartholomew’s, the organ gave one soft note though no one sat at the keys.

On the third morning, the singing stopped. Mrs. Peake sent for the constable.

They found the back door unlocked and the kitchen neat. Pot roast hardened in its pan. Three places set at the table. The parlor clock still fixed at 11:47.

The workshop smelled of candle smoke, oil, and fresh varnish.

Arthur Whitlock was not there. Clara Whitlock was not there.

There were no bodies. No blood beyond a few dark thumbprints on the workbench. No sign of struggle except the floorboards, where three circles had been cut deep enough to expose raw wood.

In the center of the room stood three new carolers. A father. A mother. A child.

The father’s face had Arthur’s narrow chin and one cracked cheek where the paint had dried too fast. A brass winding key rested behind his ear. His gloved hand held a hymnal open to “Silent Night.” The child wore a red velvet dress. One front tooth was missing from her painted smile. The mother stood behind her, one hand fixed on the child’s shoulder.

The constable said it was Arthur’s finest work. He said grief had finally ruined the man. He said the figures ought to be moved somewhere decent before the house was closed.

When they lifted the mother-caroler, Mrs. Peake noticed the wedding ring sealed beneath the varnish of its left hand. No one could remove it.

They carried the three figures to St. Bartholomew’s for safekeeping until Arthur and Clara could be found. By Advent, no one had found them. The church, being practical, placed the carolers beside the pageant manger. Arthur had always donated his work before. It seemed wrong to leave such craftsmanship under dust.

On Christmas Eve, the choir began.

The father sang cleanly. The child sang sweetly. The mother came in late.

Only half a beat. Barely enough to trouble the hymn. The vicar blamed the cold. The organist blamed old springs. The children giggled until their mothers hushed them.

Then the child-caroler reached the final line.

“Sleep in heavy peace.”

The mother’s wooden fingers tightened around the red velvet sleeve.

🗡️ Razor-Sharp Darkness: Veronica Roth’s To Clutch a Razor

Curse Bearer #2 • Tor Books • ~240 pages • Urban fantasy / folk horror

⚠️ Spoiler Warning: Minor spoilers for both When Among Crows and To Clutch a Razor.

🩸 The Short Version

To Clutch a Razor returns to Veronica Roth’s Curse Bearer world and asks a simple, ugly question: what happens when the monster-hunting knight becomes the monster and still believes in duty?

Set between modern Chicago and a wintry “old country” Poland, the novella shifts the series from origin-story setup into a brutal family horror about guilt, indoctrination, and the cost of choosing a new life over the one that raised you.

This is less jump-scare horror than creeping, relational dread: a story about sitting at a table with people who taught you to kill in God’s name, knowing you might have to kill them to survive.

⚰️ Premise: Funeral, Heist, Debt to a Witch

In the aftermath of When Among Crows, Dymitr is unmoored. Once a sanctified monster-hunter for the Holy Order, he’s now the very creature he was trained to exterminate, severed from his soul-forged bone sword and rotting under the strain.

He still owes Baba Jaga a debt. The fastest way to pay it is horrific: kill thirty-three of his former brothers-in-arms, starting with his grandmother, the matriarch of a family that treats killing “monsters” as sacrament.

Unwilling to accept that bargain, Dymitr seizes on an alternative: steal his family’s most jealously guarded artifact, an ancient book of curses, during the Empty Night funeral rite, a vigil meant to keep evil at bay.

Ala, the zmora bound to a bloodline curse, and Niko, the chaotic new addition to Dymitr’s found family, accompany him to rural Poland. What follows is a single night of escalating tension: a house full of armed, sanctified relatives; a corpse at the center of ritual; a cursed book under lock and key; and a protagonist whose new loyalties and old training are tearing him apart.

The setup is lean: one location, one rite, one impossible objective. The horror comes from how much of Dymitr will be left when the sun comes up.

🌲 Subgenre & Atmosphere: Folk Horror in an Urban Fantasy Body

On paper, To Clutch a Razor sits in urban fantasy: contemporary setting, magic under the surface of Chicago and Poland, folkloric beings operating parallel to human life.

In practice, this reads like folk horror fused with family drama:

Folk horror:

The Empty Night rite, village church, and generational curse-book tie horror to specific cultural practices and rural landscapes.

The “old country” isn’t a vague Eastern-Europe aesthetic; Roth leans on Polish Catholic ritual, Slavic myth, and emigration history in ways that feel grounded rather than exoticizing.

Religious / institutional horror:

The Holy Order and Dymitr’s hunter family function as a sanctified death cult in nice vestments: pious language wrapped around systemic violence.

Doctrine turns love into cruelty and obedience into atrocity, and the book keeps circling that point.

Psychological horror:

Dymitr’s body is changing, his mind fraying, and he has to sit through what amounts to a family reunion with people who would kill Ala on sight.

The “monster” is as much his internalization of the Order’s worldview as anything with claws.

The mood is claustrophobic and wintry: a house full of holy killers, candlelit rites, a curse-book humming with danger, and the sense that stepping outside the script of family and faith is more dangerous than any demon.

🧠 Horror Engine: What Actually Hurts

This is not a book of big set-piece scares. Its horror runs along three main veins:

1. Body & soul horror

Dymitr’s body is changing in slow, ugly ways. His condition reads less like a cool supernatural power-up and more like chronic damage: exhaustion, pain, the sense of being used-up meat. The missing soul-sword leaves him spiritually anemic and physically vulnerable; every fight feels like a bad bet, not a heroic flourish.

The result is a kind of quiet body horror: not splatter for its own sake, but the terror of your own flesh and soul becoming unreliable.

2. Family as monster

The real “creature feature” here is Dymitr’s lineage. His kin are efficient, devout killers who talk about hunting with the calm of people discussing Sunday chores. They are loving in the narrow, conditional way institutions allow: tenderness is fine as long as you keep killing the right targets.

Roth uses the family gathering like a haunted house: every room contains a different mixture of affection, suspicion, and threat. Small domestic details (teacups, shared memories, childhood nicknames) sit alongside the knowledge that several people at this table would kill Ala without hesitation. That dissonance is the horror.

3. Moral and spiritual dread

The Curse Bearer series is obsessed with guilt, penance, and repair for people raised to harm.

Here, Roth sharpens that into a central dilemma:

If you were shaped by an institution that teaches violence as virtue, how much blood is “enough” to atone?

When you understand why someone became a monster, what does forgiveness actually look like?

Is choosing your found family an act of grace or betrayal?

The novella keeps weaponizing these questions. There are no clean answers, only choices that narrow Dymitr’s future with each page.

🫀 Character & Relationship Work

Dymitr: penitent, monstrous, still dangerous

Dymitr’s arc is the book’s spine. In When Among Crows, he was primarily defined by guilt and a mission. Here he feels more lived-in: exhausted, angry, intermittently selfish, and still capable of cruelty. His attempts to “do better” are messy, and the story refuses to absolve him just because he feels bad.

Watching him move through his childhood home, caught between learned reflexes and new loyalties, is where the book is most effective. Every small courtesy to his family feels like treason to Ala; every protective reflex toward Ala feels like another cut from the blade he was forged to be.

Ala & Niko: found family under pressure

Ala remains the emotional core: a cursed being who has spent her life being hunted, now walking into the lion’s den with the person who used to hold the spear. She gets less page-time than Dymitr but the time she does get is sharp, and her presence re-frames every “family moment,” making it impossible to romanticize the old ways.

Niko adds volatility and queer, chaotic energy that keeps the book from sinking completely into penance gloom. He also forces Dymitr to confront the gap between the family he chose and the one that trained him.

The relationships push closest to romance and tenderness, but Roth never lets that softness erase the underlying horror of what these people have done and might still do.

🛠️ Craft: Prose, Pacing, Worldbuilding

Prose: Roth’s style here is tighter and more controlled than a lot of her earlier work: more specific, less ornamental. The strongest lines land like splinters: images of layered pain, burned-out fear, and faith that feels like a wound rather than comfort.

Pacing: The novella format works in its favor. Where When Among Crows sometimes felt like it was jamming too much lore into too few pages, To Clutch a Razor benefits from its tight temporal window: one night, one rite, one heist. There are still a few rushed emotional beats, but the overall structure is clean and tense.

Worldbuilding: The folklore system is more integrated this time. The Empty Night rite, the curse-book, and the Order’s history all deepen the sense of a living tradition rather than a generic monster-hunter cosmology.

That said, the larger metaphysical underpinnings (how curse magic works in detail, what exactly Baba Jaga ultimately wants) are still sketched rather than fully articulated. Readers who want a crunchy, rule-heavy magic system may feel slightly underfed.

⚖️ Limitations & Frustrations

1. Brevity vs scope The compressed length keeps tension high, but some tantalizing elements get only a drive-by: the Holy Order’s broader history, the politics of monster-hunting across borders, the full mechanics of the curse ledger. The ideas are potent, but not fully explored.

2. Series positioning Like When Among Crows, this still carries a faint “extended prologue” energy: a meticulous setting of the chessboard before the larger saga where Dymitr, Ala, and Niko move more freely in a wider supernatural world. If the series stops here, some readers may feel the larger mythic framework was just getting started.

3. Horror expectations If you’re looking for relentless, set-piece-driven horror or extreme content, this may skew too emotional and introspective. It sits closer to dark urban fantasy with horror sensibilities than to splatterpunk or full-on cosmic horror.

🚨 Content Notes

Not exhaustive, but useful to know going in:

Violence, including against family members

Religious abuse / indoctrination and associated guilt

Body horror elements (transformation, physical deterioration)

Grief and death rituals

The book treats these seriously rather than as cheap shock, but they’re baked deeply into the story.

⭐ Verdict

To Clutch a Razor is a stronger, darker, and more focused successor to When Among Crows: a tight, one-night story where the real horror isn’t just what stalks in the dark, but what’s been sanctified in daylight for generations.

It excels when it keeps its eyes on Dymitr’s divided loyalties and the question of whether someone forged as a holy weapon can ever become anything else. The supernatural trappings are sharp, the folklore is textured, and the moral questions are nastier and more interesting than most mainstream urban fantasy even tries for.

Rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐☆ (4/5) A brutal, emotionally dense, folk-horror-laced urban fantasy that hits hardest when it treats monsterhood as a moral category, not just a monstrous body.

🎯 Recommendation

You’ll likely appreciate To Clutch a Razor if you’re into:

Folk / family horror rooted in specific cultural traditions

Urban fantasy that cares more about guilt, faith, and found family than quippy banter

Stories about leaving an abusive ideology and realizing it still lives inside you

Supernatural fiction where romance and tenderness are hard-won, not guaranteed

If When Among Crows hooked you with its atmospheric grief and Slavic myth under Chicago’s streets, this follow-up digs deeper into the rot beneath duty and blood.