Wild Fell (A Ghost Story)

The crumbling summerhouse called Wild Fell, soaring above the desolate shores of Blackmore Island, has weathered the violence of the seasons for more than a century. Built for his family by a 19th-century politician of impeccable rectitude, the house has kept its terrible secrets and its darkness sealed within its walls. For a hundred years, the townspeople of Alvina have prayed that the darkness inside Wild Fell would stay there, locked away from the light. Jameson Browning, a man well acquainted with suffering, has purchased Wild Fell with the intention of beginning a new life, of letting in the light. But what waits for him at the house is devoted to its darkness and guards it jealously. It has been waiting for Jameson his whole life - or even longer. And now, at long last, it has found him.

Vince Liaguno, editor of the Bram Stoker Award-winning Unspeakable Horror: From the Shadows of the Closet

“Rowe’s tale of teenage anguish and loneliness (October) is an exquisitely told cautionary tale, rich in visceral images of horror and the erotic.”

Bracken MacLeod, author of Stranded and 13 Views of the Suicide Woods

“October is the kind of horror novel a lot of adults needed when they were kids. Michael Rowe understands that while it gets better for some people, not everyone can afford to sit back and wait if they want to survive. A powerful and powerfully frightening tale about making hard choices in the name of survival, and what those choices cost. Because becoming who you are really means making a deal with the Devil. And sometimes, the Devil is the only one who really understands.”

Lee Thomas, Lambda Literary Award- and Bram Stoker Award-winning author of The German and Down on Your Knees

“Michael Rowe’s talent shines through in this terrifying story of black magic, social persecution, and desire gone horrifically wrong. Readers will immediately identify with the story of Mikey Childress, and they’ll hold on for dear life as Mikey’s search for acceptance and a dream of love drag them across a jagged terrain of brutality and indifference. With October, Rowe taps into the primal terrors of a teen’s life, exploring the loneliness and misery of an outcast who finds his only salvation in a vicious, dark place.”

Clive Barker

“[Wild Fell is a] superb ghost story that evokes terrors both ancient and modern, and delivers us to a place of profound fear.”

Christopher Rice

“[A] major new talent. Michael Rowe is now on my must-read list.”

Electric Lit

“[Wild Fell] by Canadian author Michael Rowe fulfills the Hobbesian ideal of a haunted house novel: nasty, brutish and short. Also, elegant. With more than a little meta-fictional self-awareness―another trope of the haunted house novel post-1820, when the genre was already centuries old―Rowe tells the story of damaged ingénue Jameson Browning, who purchases the titular mansion on a lake-locked outcropping called Blackmore Island after an accident which puts him in possession of a sizable cash settlement. The ghosts are also real in Rowe, this time in the visage of Rosa Blackmore, a spectral teenager who makes known her presence in grim, strobic flashes around the estate. And yet, as in all the best haunted house stories, the specter in Wild Fell is more than just that; it’s a powerful human emotion made flesh―or un-flesh, as the case may be. While over it all loom the spires of Wild Fell: dwelt in by Jameson, dwelling in him.”

Susie Moloney for CBC Manitoba

“Michael Rowe writes like a storyteller, so seamlessly that the words disappear under your skin.”

About the Author

Michael Rowe is the author of Enter, Night (CZP) and has received the Lambda Literary Award and the Spectrum Award. He was a finalist for the International Horror Guild, Sunburst, Aurora and National Magazine Awards. Clive Barker has lauded Rowe for “changing the face of horror” with his Queer Fear anthologies.

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