The Blight: Root and Bone

It didn't die in the fire. It learned.

A year after Boghennis burned, the valley in County Mayo is sealed behind the Containment Line: four miles of ditch, salt, diesel and sensors. Jason Kennedy, the man who set the hall alight, now advises the soldiers guarding it. He thought the worst was over.

Then a pale dome, purple-veined and half a mile across, rises from the bog with hawthorns growing out of it. Dead animals turn up threaded into the earth. And a barefoot man in a dark coat waits at the end of a farm lane, wearing the face of Martin Morton.

Martin was taken by the Blight and rebuilt from ash and bone. Half of him is still the stubborn farmer Jason knew. The other half is bark. He claims he wants the thing destroyed, and he may be the only one who knows how.

Mycologist Elena Veyra is sure the Blight isn't just spreading. It's studying the people of Ballymurrin. When the town's own streets begin to rise, Jason and Elena have to stake everything on a man who may no longer be a man.

Rooted in Irish folklore and the fierce beauty of the West, Root and Bone is a folk-horror novel about grief, loyalty, and the things that wait beneath the ground.