I’m very excited today to share with you an excerpt from Jen Williams’ upcoming supernatural thrilled THE HUNGRY DARK

Due for release in April this year, The Hungry Dark is Jen’s latest crime thriller which takes a huge firm step into supernatural horror. Before we check out the excerpt, here’s the official blurb:

Master of unsettling suspense Jen Williams is back with another chilling, dark read that will draw readers into a gruesome and atmospheric nightmare

Macabre murders plague a rural town as a scam-artist psychic races to find the answers in this haunting thriller from award-winning author Jen Williams, perfect for fans of C.J. Tudor and Alex North.

As a child, Ashley Whitelam was haunted by ghostly figures no one else could see. Silent and watchful, these Heedful Ones followed her wherever she went. She hasn’t seen them for eighteen years, not since that fateful night at Red Rigg House. But now they’re back, and they’re trying to tell her something.

As children begin to disappear across the Lake District, Ashley becomes involved in the investigation, eager for free publicity to promote her work as a psychic. She never expected the collaborating to bear fruit, but when she discovers the body of one of the missing children, everything changes.

The police are convinced that she’s involved with the killings, and the press are hounding her for answers. Desperate to clear her name, she works with true crime podcaster, Freddie Miller, to investigate. As they look deeper into the disappearances, Ashley must dig into the demons of her past, before the nightmare in the present comes for her, too.

Keep an eye out soon for my review!

The Hungry Dark is due for release 11th April from HarperCollins. You can order you copy from Bookshop.org

c h a p t e r
3

Some places are just bad.

You will have experienced this yourself, but you might not have been aware of it at the time. At its most basic level, perhaps you crossed the street once because you spotted the mouth of a dark alley and didn’t want to walk past it; you knew that doing so would expose yourself somehow. You might have stayed in a hotel and been unable to properly relax, experiencing several nights of terrible sleep, or the kind of nightmares that leave you morose and exhausted the next day. You may have crossed the threshold of a church and felt immediately that you should not be there. Bad places.

Sometimes there will be obvious reasons why a house or a park or a classroom feels wrong—blood spilled, bodies broken, a violation, a secret shared that should have been taken to the grave. More often though, there is no particular reason—or at least none that we can comprehend—and even places that appear entirely pleasant can leave you with the desperate urge to be elsewhere as soon as possible.

And it isn’t only urban places that can be bad. The oldest ones have existed since before humankind was little more than a particularly curious ape. They predate architecture, cities, plumbing. They could even predate mammals, trees, the first animals that dragged themselves out of the oceans. For all we know, the first amino acids in the primordial soup could have felt a shiver of wrongness as they passed over a particular piece of molten rock. But we’re getting away from the point.

Hundreds of thousands of years ago, when the mountains of northern Britain were already unimaginably old, there was a fell where no birds flew. The people who lived in its vicinity were frightened of it, and none of them would venture near it after sunset. They told stories about the mountain—how people would walk up it and never come back down, how the wolves howled from its summit. They whispered that it was hollow, that there was a secret way inside the mountain, and if you stumbled across it, the gods of wood, spring, and earth would forsake you.

Bad things happened on the fell. Just as most people are repelled by bad places, there are always those who are drawn to them instead. It was a place for violence and hatred, a place for oaths sworn and broken, and for terrible desires shared. Men and women fought and were killed there; the weakest elders were brought there by their grown children, in secret, to die on its exposed flanks.

During one especially vicious winter, a winter that heralded a longer period of darkness and ice, a girl child was taken to the mountain by a group of men. These men were from her own village, but as the snows came and the food dwindled, there was no longer room for a wan girl with fragile bones. She had eyes of two colors, which they believed marked her as an evil spirit, and so it was decided that she would be given in sacrifice—perhaps if she were expelled, if she were given to the mountain, this particular winter would lose some of its teeth, and more of them would come through it alive. Not even her family would speak out in her favor. Bad places have a way of streamlining these kinds of thoughts, a way of neatly knocking off the thorns and burrs of conscience so that the arrow of violence can fly true. They beat her, and she was left bleeding her last on the icy ground. Abandoned, starving, and betrayed.

Seeking shelter from the freezing wind, the girl pulled herself into a narrow crack in the side of the fell and found that at least some of the stories were true—there was a way through, a hollow place. With death’s cold hands around her neck, the girl gave her heart’s blood to the hollow, along with all of her rage and her hunger. And with her last breath, she whispered a curse on the people who had brought her to this place, a curse that would last as long as the hills.

“Feed the fell,” she whispered. “You’ll feed the fell forever to stop it eating you.”

When the men and women came walking up the mountain again as the first thaws began to ease the grip of winter, they were startled to find that the blood of the girl was still there, miraculously frozen into the ice, streaks of crimson sparkling in the early spring sun like a vein of rubies.

They gave it a new name in honor of its bloody countenance and then they left, uneasy in a way they had yet to understand.

It had always been a bad place.

The Hungry Dark is due for release 11th April from HarperCollins. You can order you copy from Bookshop.org

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