Crom Cruach

About CROM CRUACH:A family is found slaughtered in their home, yet their corpses still move; committed to the routine of their daily lives, heedless of their own grisly deaths. A local occultist commune is suspected of the crime. The bloody legacy of Catholicism and the dark roots of ancient paganism intertwine in the aftermath of a recent national revolution. Welcome to the Ireland of tomorrow. Two ex-Gardai officers, a former Franciscan monk and a young trans woman race to determine the cause of the slayings before tensions in the community boil over and kick off a new Satanic Panic, driving the tenuous fledgling nation back into the arms of the Church. CROM CRUACH is a distinctly Irish anxiety piece about the reluctant future and repressed past of a country trying to shrug off the shackles of colonialism, wrapped in the shiny black leather of Giallo and written in a poetic style fit for the fog-shrouded mysticism of the emerald isle. About the Author:Valkyrie Loughcrewe lives in a bog, and is currently working on something gory and crawling with nightmare creatures. Whatever you do, don't look them up on Twitter-in fact, don't look anyone up on Twitter. Start raising homing pigeons! Val also makes diabolical industrial electro music under the name Surgeryhead and gnarly death thrash metal as Argento! Praise for CROM CRUACH:"Loughcrewe plunges their readers head first into a skillful mix of folkloric, speculative and human horror. CROM CRUACH left me breathless at every turn, afraid to turn the page, afraid not to. It's not hyperbole to say I finished this novella with my mouth hanging open, my heart alight with horror and my mind afire with possibility. An incredible read, not to be missed."Laurel Hightower, author of Crossroads and Below "Loughcrewe's CROM CRUACH startled me. We might need to invent a new genre for them, like Anarcho-Folk Splatter or Lyrical Black-Metal Horror. If you don't want to read a novella-length poem mixing ancient occult horror with modern communal politics that's efficiently and viscerally detailed in glorious lines like, 'Lynda was missing her head, Cora, and she was singing,' well then, I really don't know how to help you."Joe Koch, author of The Wingspan of Severed Hands