The Croning

Donald Miller is a geologist and academic of nearly eighty. For most of his life he has lived beside a chasm, his days split between an endearing absent-mindedness and flashes of understanding that threaten his sanity.

Now the pieces are coming together. Donald begins to uncover dark secrets lying at the edges of his life, and they point at the people closest to him: his wife Michelle, their adult twins, and everything he has trusted. What he finds is savage, and it leads to the secret of The Croning.

Behind it stand the Children of Old Leech, beings said to have been with humanity since time immemorial. They keep to the dark beyond the firelight, alongside black magic and weird cults, and they love us.

This is cosmic horror, a novel about an old man whose ordinary domestic world turns out to rest on something ancient and hostile. The threat comes from inside the family home as much as from the dark outside it, and the dread builds as Donald learns how much he has not known.