The Perfect World: A romance of strange people and strange places

Two cousins arrive in the village of Marshfielden, seeking work in the coal mines, only to discover that the village hides darker secrets than its superstitious inhabitants will admit. A centuries-old Curse haunts outsiders who dig too deep into the earth, and when Alan and Desmond Forsyth begin their work, they unleash something ancient and terrible. But the mines lead somewhere unexpected: far beneath the surface lies a hidden world, a perfect civilization of stunted descendants from the lost tribes, their existence intertwined with cosmic mysteries of light, the end of the world, and the vast solar regions beyond. This is hollow earth fiction at its most unhinged, a late-Victorian fever dream that moves from English mining village to interplanetary speculation in the span of a few chapters. Scrymsour constructs an entire mythology of subterranean peoples, their prophecies, and their cosmic destiny, layering ghost story conventions with pulp speculation about what lies beneath and beyond our world. For readers who loved H.G. Wells or the weirdest corners of Victorian fantasy.