MORIAH

A work of historical Gothic horror which recalls the Victorian
fiction of Sarah Waters, Michael Cox, and Charles Palliser

Silas Flood is haunted, a broken man in a broken country. Nine years have passed since the end of the American Civil War and Flood is helpless to escape its shadow. During the war, he served as an army chaplain at the Wilderness and Spotsylvania only to lose his faith, his family, and his vocation. Now he finds work as a journalist for a New York newspaper.

In the summer of 1874 he is dispatched to the mountain village of Moriah, Vermont to investigate sensational claims of supernatural happenings at a wayside inn. There the brothers Thaddeus and Ambrose Lynch are said to converse with spirits and summon the dead.

In Moriah, Flood encounters others like himself: a grieving couple, a childless widow. By day he questions the Lynch brothers who prove less than forthcoming. They too are haunted by buried secrets, old ghosts. In the evenings he attends séances where the resurrected dead dance and sing and give comfort to the living. As Flood investigates the true nature of these phenomena he is forced to come to terms with his own past and with the hold it has upon him.

DANIEL MILLS is the author of Revenants: A Dream of New England (Chomu Press, 2011) and The Lord Came at Twilight (Dark Renaissance books, 2014). His short fiction has appeared in various magazines and anthologies including Black Static, Shadows & Tall Trees, The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror, and The Year's Best Dark Fantasy and Horror. He lives in Vermont.