First published 2025
Twelve years ago, a kiss bound a circle of friends to Thornchapel and to each other. Now the circle has fractured. Proserpina and St. Sebastian are gone. Delphine has run. Becket's faith is cracking. Only Ash and Rebecca remain at the old estate, standing before a door that should not exist, a door that has already cost lives and refuses to stay shut. Ash does not feel like a lord or a god or a king. He feels like a boyfriend who lost his partners, a friend who failed everyone, a brother falling short. But Samhain is coming, and the door does not weigh his guilt. It wants a sacrifice. It wants the thing the old stories always demand from the man who wears the crown. Ash has to decide what he is willing to give, and whether the people he loves, the village, the valley, the whole tangled life they built together, are worth the price the door names. The answer has been written into Thornchapel since long before he was born. Here, all kings must die.
Genres: literary-fiction, fantasy, horror, adult, adult-fiction, dark-fantasy
Vibes: atmospheric, dark, haunting, introspective, melancholic, suspenseful
Tropes: chosen-one, dark-pact, found-family, unreliable-reality
Setting: Thornchapel, the valley
Period: Samhain
464 pages · Paperback · Bloom Books
Content warnings: death, violence