At the river’s edge the stones lay close… a voice in the water remembers.

Overview

The Blood King: Slaughtaverty Voices is a work of speculative-ritual fiction rooted in the folklore of Abhartach, the so-called Blood King of Slaughtaverty in County Londonderry. Drawing on oral tradition, historical trace, and poetic reconstruction, reimagining the landscape as both witness and accomplice — a terrain where silence, story, and blood intertwine.

Told through multiple voices, the work moves between myth and memory, exploring how violence and belief embed themselves in language and place. It is less a retelling than a listening — a summoning of what lies beneath the surface of history.

Form and Themes

The novella operates as a polyphonic mythography, merging the rhythms of folklore and fieldwork. It asks how story performs its own haunting: how the spoken and the unsaid persist in the body, in the land, and in the act of remembrance.

Themes of ritual, complicity, and endurance run throughout — where speech becomes invocation and silence gathers its own weight.

Publication

Released October 2025 as part of my ongoing Fiction series.

“The Blood King: Slaughtaverty Voices” — Available now as a Ritual Digital Artefact — downloadable exclusively via my Ko-fi page ➜

No voice is ever lost, it just waits for the mouth that will remember it.