Catherine Mays

The Summoning Catherine Mays

1490. Luke Maudlin has been brought back to life, but he's degenerating fast. So a girl is summoned from far in his future to visit him for five days every month. The first time is traumatic. When nobody believes her story, Claire finds herself caught in the nightmare of not one time, but two.

SEPARATED BY TIME. JOINED BY BLOOD.

The close of the 15th Century. The modern world is stirring from the troubled sleep of the Dark Ages. In rural, feudal England, handheld guns are beginning to appear. The nature of warfare is changing. The nature of religion is changing. Man is becoming more powerful than his creator.

Luke Maudlin doesn't know it, but he's not the miller's son. He's the result of a coupling between his desperate childless mother Hannah and the creature in the ruined manor overlooking their village. A monster that used to be a man. A thing they call Quelch.

Maybe Quelch was the spawn of the devil. Maybe he descended from angels. Whatever his origins, over the countless years of his immortality he has forgotten his own humanity. Now he's just a foul beast, scrabbling in the filth, preying on strangers.

Damned or holy? The villagers can't decide. They hate him, fear him, and protect him.

When recruiters raid the village, looking for boys for a foreign war, Luke's killed defending it. He returns to find himself alive - and as cursed as Quelch. The village banishes him to the manor where he's doomed to share his father's fate. Becoming corrupted. Turning into another beast.

So Hannah summons Claire Knott, a 13-year-old girl far in her future, to come to Luke every time she has her period. To give him a connection with the world of the living. To remind him who he was.

But already he has begun to degenerate, and the first summoning is brutal.

Is it too late for him? And for her?

A FOLK HORROR NIGHTMARE.

The Summoning is a thriller of psychic shock and all too real damage.