Old Children - Sylvia Littlegood-Briggs (paperback)

Old Children by Sylvia Littlegood-Briggs / 162-page paperback, published in 2025 by Broodcomb Press (reprinting their limited 2024 hardback)

Broodcomb Press is a UK publisher specializing in weird fiction and beyond: "Encompassing poetry, strange tales and experimental fiction, Broodcomb Press is a home for the writing that belongs here: disquieting truths about the region ("the peninsula") – tales both eerie and shocking – together with exploring the fantastic/everyday meaning of what it means to be human."

***

“Another world was beside them even now. Jack would never be able to articulate it, but he knew there were aspects of his time in Blackwood Cottage with Polly that he could not fully accept. There was how things might be explained or ignored, and then there was the truth. The truth that Robert Hobbins never left, he just became invisible; that the tall man’s cat namesake was more conscious than any other cat; that if Jack was still working towards dusk, when the air was still, the faint almost-heard knocking he heard was not a distant axe chopping wood, or a picture being framed in a village cottage, the sound carrying for miles, nor even a late woodpecker: the knocking in truth came from within the grave he had himself dug.”

Wild Marjoram Tea by Sylvia Littlegood-Briggs was steeped in peninsular folklore, and her new novel, Old Children, returns to the same landscape to tell a tale of theft and return, once again taking us far from the fields we know and deep into a sinister world that exists just next door—

Like its predecessor, Old Children is both haunting and filled with disquiet. As ever, it might not be for you—