The Last Room at the Grey Bell
Snowed in at a Highland inn with one room left, she agreed to share it with a stranger who had come to ring a bell for the dead.
21 min read-
-
The One Bed Trope Explained, With Free Stories
What is the only one bed trope? The one bed trope, “there was only one bed”, is a romance setup in which two characters who cannot or should not touch have to share a bed for a night: the inn has one room left, the storm has closed the road, the cover story requires it….
7 min read -
Gothic Romance: The Genre Explained, With Free Stories
What is gothic romance? Gothic romance is the genre where the setting is a character. A house, a lighthouse, an abbey or a bell tower with a past; weather that will not lift; a heroine who arrives as an outsider; a man who is not straightforwardly good; and a secret the building itself seems complicit…
7 min read -
Forced Proximity Romance: The Trope Explained, With Free Stories
What is forced proximity? Forced proximity is the romance trope in which circumstances push two people together and keep them there: snowed in, stranded, sharing a cabin, a cell, a space station or a single bed. There is nowhere to go, so there is nowhere to hide, and the defences that hold perfectly well in…
6 min read -
The Vampire’s Beekeeper
A former City litigator hives a swarm of black bees that fly by night. The neighbour who claims them lives on their honey, and the law says they are hers.
17 min read -
The Lighthouse Keeper’s Daughter
Maren Solvik had not set foot on Heksholmen in fourteen years, and she had planned to extend that record indefinitely. The island — a spur of black rock jutting from the Norwegian Sea like a clenched fist — held nothing for her but memories she had spent her adult life learning to outrun. The lighthouse….
10 min read -
The Bellringer of Saint Elara
The bells of Saint Elara had been silent for eleven years when Margaux Delacroix arrived to restore them. The church stood at the edge of the village of Briarthorn, where the Somerset levels met the Mendip Hills in a disputed borderland of mist and ancient grievance. It was a building of considerable beauty and even…
10 min read -
The Keeper of Ashworth Abbey
Snowbound in a Yorkshire abbey, a cataloguer opens the last locked bay and finds one man’s journals from 1538 to last week, and what finishing the list will cost him.
13 min read
