Scratch Moss

It’s bad when the heart is ripped out of a community… it’s worse when it loses its soul.


1865. There is coal under the fields of Scratch Moss Manor and Sir Henry Brody is determined to get at it. But there is something else in the ground as well, something dark and evil

1905. A more Godless set of people the Reverend George Ackman has never known than the people of the northern town of Scratch Moss. But if not God, what do they believe in?

1945. Arthur works for the Coal Commission, visiting privately-owned pits ahead of their nationalisation. But something is amiss in Scratch Moss, with a disturbing number of deaths at the mine and children going missing in the tunnels.

1985. The miners have lost. Thatcher reigns supreme. And in the shattered community of Scratch Moss, rumours resurface about Red Clogs, a terrible presence in the land below.

2025: Divorced, fifty-something writer Joe returns to the former mining community of Scratch Moss where he grew up, for the funeral of his father. Soon the memories of Joe’s teenage years, and the horror that blighted the community, come flooding back.

A devastating, five-timeline tale centred on a community first invigorated, then devastated by the coal mining industry in the most original folk horror novel of the year.