M. J. SALLOW
Folk horror about faith, evidence, and small places that cannot hear the truth.
The Fair Copy
A novel of folk horror
On the island of Ness, the sea wall is everything. Every spring the whole town walks it singing, a hand on the stones, and every child’s name is sealed in a tin inside it, so the wall knows them.
Maud Kerrow is the island’s copyist. Her family has written out the Book of the Mend for two hundred years, and she has never once read it for what it says. Then a winter storm cracks the old hearth, and behind a loose brick Maud finds a tin of papers in the founder’s own hand: draft after draft of the gods her neighbors pray to, crossed out and tried again.
She knows paper. She knows these were made by a man.
But Ness has a word for someone who speaks against the Keepers. A Hollow: a shape the sea sent back with no one inside it. And everyone who loves her, her nearly blind mother, the young Speaker who has never doubted, the Reeve who keeps the keys to the Low Gate, believes, kindly and sincerely, that they must find out what she is.
The Fair Copy is a grave, quiet novel of folk horror about faith and evidence, about kindness, and about what it costs to know one true thing in a town that cannot hear it.
Get The Fair Copy on AmazonKindle (also in Kindle Unlimited) and paperback.