The House of Souls

In this compact volume the writer moves from his beloved, swirling language of seventeenth‑century prose into a cleaner, more immediate style, yet he never lets go of the haunting sense of antiquity that colored his earlier work. The stories are rooted in ordinary lives—an office clerk, a market‑town antiquary—only to be brushed by strange, almost forgotten histories that surface in moments of sudden, unsettling clarity. With each tale the familiar world flickers, revealing a thin veil that separates everyday routine from the echo of long‑dead souls.

The opening story introduces a modest clerk whose hurried mornings and cramped city routine are interrupted by an inexplicable flash of ancestral memory, a sensation that pulls him toward a forgotten Welsh manor and a lineage he never imagined. As the narrative unfolds, the ordinary setting becomes a crucible for an uncanny awareness, hinting at forces that linger beyond death’s finality. The piece sets the tone for the collection: a gentle, unsettling blend of everyday detail and the lingering presence of the past, inviting listeners to linger in the quiet spaces where the living brush against the unseen.