Mearc has entered its final editing stage, and returning to this manuscript has become one of the most enjoyable, atmospheric parts of my writing year. It is a strange pleasure to travel again through a world one has made and discover how differently it feels when the task is no longer to invent the path, but to listen to every footfall upon it.
This is an experimental work of folk horror, although the term horror may suggest the wrong kind of expectation. There are no monsters waiting beyond the heather, no ancient deity requiring an explanation, and no conventional cast of characters carrying the reader from one incident to the next. Its subject is more immediate: a landscape, the traces people leave within it, and the human tendency to recognise forms and intentions in what may be perfectly ordinary.
An experience rather than a conventional story
The book begins in an empty village at the edge of Dartmoor, on a hot summer afternoon. Houses, farms, gardens and a chapel are all materially present. Their occupants are not. Nothing announces a catastrophe. The journey follows a track towards woodland, a gorge and open moor, where small marks, repetitions and changes in perspective begin to acquire an accumulating weight.
The narration behaves rather like a patient, silent camera. It lingers over heat, insects, smells, the grain of stone, the movement of grass, sounds carried through a hedge. It does not hurriedly translate each detail into a clue. Instead, the reader is given time to build connections, to doubt them, and sometimes to discover that attention itself has changed what seems to be there.
A passage from the village
From the current working manuscript:
Nothing in the village is ruined. No window has been smashed. No doors hang from their hinges. There are no weeds growing through floors, no roofs opened to weather, no trees rising from abandoned rooms. The cottages remain cottages, the farms remain workable, the chapel still possesses its notices, hymn numbers and vase of dead flowers. Gardens require trimming but have not yet become wilderness.
It is precisely that persistence of ordinary life that interests me. A deserted place need not be destroyed to feel unsettling. An unanswered question may remain unanswered while everything around it continues to function.
What happens when the light changes
As the passage moves through evening into night and finally towards morning, the reader’s relation to the environment changes. Light removes information and later returns it; familiar objects seem to acquire shapes they were never designed to possess. Nothing supernatural needs to arrive. The same materials can be read differently because the eye has learned to expect something.
A second brief passage, from the later chapter ‘First Grey’:
Nothing in the darkness marks an hour. There is no horizon from which brightness might rise, no eastern edge distinguishable from west, only cloud and mist distributing what little sky exists through an undirected blackness. Yet the night begins changing elsewhere. The bats thin first.
What fascinates me about editing this particular book is how much depends on patience. A sentence can arrive too early and explain an image before it has had a chance to exist. A paragraph can become too insistent when all it needs is the smallest change of sound, temperature or light. Much of the work now is a matter of cadence and restraint — allowing the reader to assemble something without being told what to assemble.
The final editorial passage
The manuscript is complete as a working novel, and I am in the final stages of refining the prose and its presentation. This includes rhythm, continuity of sensory detail, the balance of longer passages and shorter observations, and the quiet transitions by which the reading experience develops. It is painstaking, but I am finding it unusually rewarding.
My current aim is to self-publish Mearc towards the end of 2026. That remains a likely target rather than a fixed release announcement; the final edit will have the last word.
For now, I am content to follow the path across the moor once more and see what remains when the unnecessary words have gone.
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From the writing desk of Tarek von Bergmann.