Moriah

A broken man, a broken country.Silas Flood is a former minister and army chaplain. Ten years ago, he survived the horrors of the American Civil War but lost his faith and left the church. Now he finds work as a writer for a New York newspaper.In the summer of 1874, Flood is dispatched to the village of Moriah, Vermont, where the brothers Thaddeus and Ambrose Lynch are said to conjure up spirits and speak to the dead. In Moriah, Flood questions the Lynch brothers and attends their strange séances in which the resurrected dead dance and sing and give comfort to the living.As Flood investigates the nature of these phenomena, he is forced to come to terms with his own past and with the hold it has upon him.“Mills deftly jumps between narratives as the story unfolds, his prose saturating every page with dread as he teases out his characters' secrets and lies. This intense novel will draw in readers outside Mills's usual audience.”— Publishers Weekly"Mills' spare descriptions and terse dialogue contribute to the appropriately eerie atmosphere, as do the robust journal entries that precede each chapter. Another stunningly twisted tale mired in history from a master of the macabre."— Booklist"[Mills's] trademark devotion to character, setting, atmosphere, and creeping dread is obvious... a slow burn novel immersed in the thick, claustrophobic atmosphere of a dark dream from which there is no waking up."— Rue Morgue"In Moriah, Daniel Mills summons his tale of spiritualists in backwoods, postbellum New England in a heavenly tongue. It's as though Frederick Busch or John Williams had written the screenplay for The Witch. Startling, and profoundly sad."— Adrian Van Young, author of Shadows in Summerland"Daniel Mills is a modern master of the unspoken, a classical horror miniaturist whose writing references the bleak and existentially dread-full gothic Americana of Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Charlotte Perkins Gilman. Best read out loud around a failing fire on a darksome plain, as night sets in."— Gemma Files, Shirley Jackson award-winning author of Experimental Film

About the Author

Daniel Mills is the author of Revenants: A Dream of New England (Chomu Press, 2011) and The Lord Came at Twilight (Dark Renaissance books, 2014). His short fiction has appeared in various magazines and anthologies including Black Static, Shadows & Tall Trees, The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror, and The Year’s Best Dark Fantasy and Horror. He lives in Vermont.

Reviews

News