Michael's Crag

The Cornish cliffs have a way of keeping secrets. At their base lies St. Michael's Crag, where Michael Trevennack now spends his holidays, convinced he is the archangel himself. Fifteen years ago, falling rocks struck him and his only son on these very cliffs. The boy died. Trevennack survived with a blood clot in his brain and a new, terrible identity. Now he stands on the moors above Penmorgan, watching, waiting, believing the sea belongs to him. Below, the landlord Walter Tyrrel wrestles with his own ghosts, his ancestral home weighted by a past he cannot escape and a connection to the Trevennack tragedy that haunts his conscience. The Cornish landscape becomes a character itself, beautiful and unforgiving, where grief has calcified into something stranger than sorrow. This is a novel about the stories we tell ourselves to survive, and the dangerous territories between madness, memory, and grief. Allen writes with atmospheric precision, building dread through silence and suggestion. It will appeal to readers who prefer their haunted houses to be internal, their mysteries psychological, their fiction steeped in the particular melancholy of the Victorian fin de siècle.