The Vice-Consul's Terrible Mistake
A Folk Horror Novel

About this book:

High in the frozen passes of the Marches, Vice-Consul Arthur Pendelton tends the ledgers of a dead empire, certain that British law and a steady pen can tame a valley that has never acknowledged London's sovereignty. But the mountain keeps its own records—cut in bone, paid in blood, and bound by a covenant older than any treaty. When Pendelton redraws the boundary lines across a sacred grove, he doesn't merely offend local superstition; he breaches a contract the Horned King has waited generations to collect.

With the passes sealed by winter and the legation's timbers groaning against something waking beneath the frost, the Vice-Consul discovers his predecessor's final entries: warnings he dismissed as madness, rites he mistook for folklore, and a debt that cannot be settled in coin. The villagers aren't resisting administration—they're making payment. And Arthur Pendelton has just signed his name at the bottom of the ledger.

A masterwork of slow-burning folk horror where bureaucracy meets the ancient dark, *The Vice-Consul's Terrible Mistake* is *The Wicker Man* by way of M.R. James—where every polished surface reflects something older, hungrier, and entirely indifferent to the Crown.