A Covenant Written in Blood, Soil and Silence
There are places in England where history refuses to remain in the past.
Places where the landscape remembers.
Where an ancient dry-stone wall feels as though it witnessed something it was never meant to see. Where a stand of hollow yews leans inward as if listening to the earth. Where the ground beneath your feet holds memories far older than the houses built upon its surface.
Somerset has always carried a particular, heavy atmosphere. It is a country of peat marshes and drowned levels, ancient parish churches, standing stones, sunken lanes, decaying manor houses, and secrets that outlive the people who buried them. It is the natural home for a question that has haunted me for years:
What happens when a family makes a bargain with the land—and keeps that bargain across generations?
That question forms the spine of my eight-book gothic supernatural series, The Powers of St Katherine’s House.
The story begins at Witham Grange, threads through a succession of ancestral houses, forgotten ruins, and haunted landscapes, and ultimately turns back toward the source of the original bargain. But beneath the ghost-lore and decaying stone, this is not merely a tale of apparitions.
It is a story of inheritance.
It is about bloodlines, complicity, and the terrifying weight of what our ancestors leave behind for us—whether we wish to carry it or not.
And bound to the heart of every book are three ancient spirits:
Soil. Blood. Lost Voice.
Three primal forces anchored to the landscape. Three manifestations of the original covenant. And seven bloodlines sentenced to pay the debt of keeping them there.
The Three Spirits
The mythology of The Powers of St Katherine’s House does not rely on conventional ghosts. The presences haunting these houses are older, deeper, and far less forgiving.
Soil
Soil is the memory of the earth itself.
It retains everything ever pressed into it: the footsteps, the blood, the unmarked graves, the sacrifices, and the oaths spoken over open earth. The roots of ancient yew trees sink deep into its silence, holding the forgotten boundaries of the covenant intact.
Soil is patient. It does not bargain, and it does not forget. Human beings may invent reasons to justify what they have done, or simply allow memory to fade with time. The land cannot forget.
Blood
Blood is lineage and obligation.
It is the physical thread that tethers one generation to the next. The covenant endures only because the bloodlines endure. Over centuries, surnames change, manors pass into new hands, and marriages weave one family into another, but the debt remains unbroken. Children inherit obligations they never agreed to carry, simply by virtue of the pulse in their veins.
Blood is the reason the spirits cannot be cast out or abandoned. The covenant lives inside the descendants of those who forged it—and blood always remembers where it began.
Lost Voice
Lost Voice is the memory of those who were silenced.
It represents the victims of the covenant: the people sacrificed to maintain the bindings, the women whose warnings were dismissed as madness, the witnesses coerced into silence, and the descendants who tried to speak out and were quietly removed.
Lost Voice is the most tragic and volatile of the three powers. It carries everything that centuries of ritual and polite family secrecy tried to bury. And sooner or later, a silenced voice will demand to be heard.
The Generations of the Covenant
A central theme of the series is how supernatural bargains evolve—and decay—across time.
When the covenant was first struck, the founders understood precisely what they were doing and what price they had agreed to pay. But no covenant remains static across the centuries:
- The first generation understood the bargain and its necessity.
- The second generation knew only that something terrible had to be maintained.
- The third generation inherited rituals without context.
- The fourth generation inherited rigid rules.
- The fifth generation inherited fear.
- Later generations inherited only fragments: an ominous family warning, a locked room never to be opened, an iron key without a lock, a grave that must never be walked upon, or a specific date when candles must burn on every sill until dawn.
They no longer remember why the rules exist. They obey because fear has replaced knowledge, and because family secrets survive best when no one dares to ask what will happen if the rituals cease.
The Eight Books of the Covenant
Book One — The Circle of Witham Grange
The series opens at Witham Grange, where the first fractures in the ancient pact begin to show. What initially appears to be the haunting of a single house is soon revealed to be something far larger: the house is merely a doorway, and the true haunting belongs to the land beneath it.
Here, the architecture of the Circle is laid bare—seven bloodlines, seven ancestral roles, and seven families holding pieces of a secret that has grown increasingly unstable with each passing century. The covenant was designed as a prison for the spirits, but as the present generation begins to uncover the past, a dangerous question arises: what happens when the jailers no longer wish to be imprisoned?
Book Two — The Watchers of St Hallows Gate
At St Hallows Gate, the boundary between the mortal world and the underlying forces of the land grows perilously thin. This second chapter turns its focus to the human guardians—the Watchers—whose lineage has spent centuries standing vigil over the threshold.
To watch an ancient darkness for generations, however, is to be altered by it. The Watchers inherit knowledge that the rest of the world has forgotten, but they also inherit the slow, creeping realization that the observer inevitably becomes part of the thing being watched.
Book Three — The Ashes of Blackthorn Abbey
When Blackthorn Abbey burns, it is not merely stone and timber that are destroyed; centuries of recorded history and hidden truth are reduced to cinders. As the descendants sift through the ruins, they discover that the founding families were never in full agreement about the covenant. Some viewed the spirits as dangerous entities to be bound; others saw them as sacred powers to be served; still others believed the original bargain was a catastrophic error.
Fire can raze an abbey to its foundations, but it cannot consume what lies buried beneath the soil. Destruction does not end a secret; it merely scatters the pieces.
Book Four — The Widow of Hollowmere
Hollowmere shifts the focus to the most human catalyst of supernatural danger: personal grief. Every generation leaves behind widows, widowers, orphans, and fractured households. Within the sphere of the covenant, however, sorrow is never safe.
The spirits recognize longing, and grief makes people willing to negotiate. When a bereaved descendant is faced with the ancient powers of the land, the question becomes stark: what would you sacrifice to bring back someone you love—especially if your ancestors already sacrificed them once before?
Book Five — The Pact of Ravencroft Hall
At Ravencroft Hall, another family branch is drawn into the tightening circle. Though the families have scattered across Somerset, bearing different surnames and telling different versions of their ancestral lore, the underlying threads of blood and soil remain unbroken.
Ravencroft Hall confronts its heirs with a severe truth: a pact can be inherited just as easily as an estate. Inheritance is not ownership—it is responsibility, complicity, and the inescapable duty of finishing what previous generations left unresolved.
Book Six — The Lanterns of Duskmoor
As the series moves across the marshes of Duskmoor, the boundary between the living and the dead dissolves almost entirely. Lanterns are meant to guide travelers safely through the dark, but on Duskmoor, the lights on the horizon do not lead home; they lure the curious toward the ancient boundaries of the binding.
With the original purpose of the covenant distorted by centuries of half-truths, the descendants are forced to confront an unsettling reality: they are no longer certain who is holding the leash, and who is being led.
Book Seven — The Powers of St Katherine’s House
All roads, all bloodlines, and all secrets converge at St Katherine’s House. As the core of the entire series, this book brings the full history of the covenant into the light.
Here, the true meaning of the title is revealed. The “powers” are not mere spells or spectral manifestations; they are the accumulated weight of blood, memory, sacrifice, and unyielding land. At St Katherine’s House, the surviving heirs must finally confront the original oath in its entirety, and decide whether a promise made centuries ago is worth the lives of those who bear it today.
Book Eight — The Thirteenth Chair
If the Circle was built upon seven bloodlines and established roles, The Thirteenth Chair introduces the element that was deliberately left out of the history books.
A chair implies a place at the table, an assigned voice, and a presence that cannot be ignored. But why thirteen? Who was meant to occupy it? And what happens if the seat was never actually vacant? The final book explores the hidden clause of the covenant—the secret kept even from the seven families themselves—bringing the mythology to its ultimate, irrevocable conclusion.
Seven Bloodlines. Three Spirits. Eight Books.
At its core, The Powers of St Katherine’s House is an exploration of the pact between humanity and the earth it inhabits.
The founders believed they were mastering the supernatural forces of Somerset. In truth, they may only have been offering themselves as collateral in an ancient exchange. Every subsequent generation added its own layer to the binding: a fresh grave, an arranged marriage, an unrecorded betrayal, an enforced silence.
The original families could never have foreseen what their bargain would demand centuries later. They could not have anticipated that their descendants would rebel against the burden, or that the silenced voices of the past would find a way to break through the stone.
Gothic supernatural fiction resonates because the monsters and curses are reflections of real human experience: the burdens of family history, the things left unsaid at dinner tables, and the realization that we are shaped by choices made long before our birth.
The Circle began with a promise whispered into the earth. The spirits were bound to the soil, the bloodlines were bound to the spirits, and over time, the line between guardian and prisoner ceased to exist.
Eight books. Seven bloodlines. Three ancient spirits. One unbroken debt.
The dead may sleep.
The houses may fall.
The bloodlines may change.
But the land remembers.
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