Night Babies

[A] claustrophobic folk horror … Expect figures looming in the shadows and whisperings in the night * Sunday Times Style *
A sophisticated, chilling tale that works both as supernatural and psychological horror * Guardian *
Night Babies is an immersive and compulsive novel about art and ego, betrayal and consequences. Beautifully written and absolutely gripping – Alison Moore, The Booker Prize shortlisted author of * The Lighthouse *
Night Babies is a perfect psychological folk horror, where the internal landscape of its protagonist and the external landscape of the Brecon Beacons join together to become an uncanny piece of art. This is a story that carefully unravels its subjects, in which old sins cast long shadows and something dark is always lurking just beneath the surface – Laura Elliott, author of * Awakened *
A considered, clever, creeping ghost story, with dark depths and dangerous undercurrents. Lucie McKnight Hardy is one of the best writers of the uncanny around – Alison Littlewood, author of * A Cold Season *
Lucie McKnight Hardy is the Queen of Dread – Priya Sharma, author of * Ormeshadow *
Night Babies is a wonderful novel; dark, disturbing, devastating. Lucie McKnight Hardy at the height of her uncanny powers. – Amanda Mason, author of * The Hiding Place *
Night Babies had me in its dark clutches from the very beginning. A beautifully written and cleverly constructed literary ghost story, exploring truth and perception in the eeriest of manners – Rachelle Attalla, author of * Thirsty Animals *
A modern classic of the folk horror genre – Johnny Mains, editor of * Celtic Weird *
You don’t know the water’s encroaching , but all of a sudden, Lucie McKnight Hardy has dragged you beneath the surface , and you are in an inescapable maelstrom of foreboding with an intense sense of imminent horror. There is no escape , you must read in. This story sticks to you like bitter black treacle – Robin Ince, host of * The Infinite Monkey Cage *
Night Babies is an utterly compulsive, pitch-black slice of folk horror. In hyper-focused artist Astrid Aspden, Lucie McKnight Hardy has created a fascinating, unlikeable, yet utterly sympathetic puzzle-box of a protagonist, capable of keeping her past - and her present - opaque to the reader until the very end. And what an ending: gory, viscous, vicious, and so damn compelling! Wow – Ally Wilkes, author of * All The White Spaces *
Reading this book is one long, slow, watery descent into uncanny territory. A Welsh chapel and the surrounding reservoir hold murky secrets, and so, we come to realise, do most of the characters. As in Water Shall Refuse Them, McKnight Hardy’s rural setting diverges from the pastoral to become a place of mounting dread. The protagonist, artist Astrid is obsessed with capturing the strange landscape. In doing so, she suffers from temporal discombobulation to the extent that her own testimony becomes unreliable; she is haunted both by supernatural beings and her own questionable choices. Like pentimenti in oil paintings, past mistakes rise inexorably to the surface. Lucie McKnight Hardy is the queen of atmospheric folk horror – Tracey Fahey, author of * They Shut Me Up *
[An] unsettling and totally compelling journey into nightmarish dread … Lucie McKnight Hardy crowns herself queen of the uncanny with this exquisite chiller that has echoes and flavours of Robert Aickman, Daphne Du Maurier and Ira Levin – Stephen Volk, BAFTA-winning screenwriter
Absolutely loved this … creepy, claustrophobic and saturated with an atmosphere of impending doom. What more could you ask for? It’s also set in the present day which is THE hardest thing to pull off with a ghost story. Superb – Will Maclean, author of * The Apparition Phase *

Lucie McKnight Hardy is the author of Water Shall Refuse Them, which was shortlisted for the Mslexia Novel Competition and longlisted for the Caledonia Novel Award, and the short story collection, Dead Relatives. Lucie grew up in West Wales and is a Welsh speaker. She has also lived in Liverpool, Cardiff, Zurich and Bradford, and now lives in Hay-on-Wye.

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