Ever notice how some places don’t feel right? No rhyme or reason, they’re just unsettling, without you being able to pinpoint the cause. The vaguely suspicious demeanour of the locals. The pewtered quality of light. The old and indefinably alien smell that blows on the breeze. Bledbrooke is one of those places. It’s always been different to other towns. The Bledbrooke Works is a cosmic horror story, redolent of dark pasts and hinting at even darker tomorrows.

“A superb horror story

In this fantastic book, Leonard displays a master’s control over a relentlessly evocative prose. It is impossible not to be drawn into this visceral tale, which matches cosmic terror with an insightful, and witty, down-to-earth social realism.

Fully recommended.”

The Bledbrooke Works · A Cosmic Horror Story.

Bledbrooke, quaint and quiet, a little backwater with a somehow dark charm all of its own. Once you get used to it, you wouldn’t want to live anywhere else. Mind, it’s not all sweetness and light in Bledbrooke. There are problems. A new one has just appeared. The drains on Cinderlake Drive are bubbling unsavoury water onto the street. It’s not just unpleasant water on the streets. Perhaps more importantly, the toilets are blocked and spitting nastiness at some affluent backsides. The town council reckon it’s a fatberg. One of those awful accumulations of wet wipes, grease and other unmentionables. There’s only one man to call…

Donald Hobdike, world-weary and well past his prime, this sort of issue inevitably ends up on his chipped desk. When it comes to the sewers in Bledbrooke, he’s seen it all and more besides. Knows them better than he knows the back of his wrinkled hand.

Or so he thinks.

Maybe the labyrinthine warren beneath Bledbrooke still has some surprises in store for him…

The Bledbrooke Works is a tale of everyday unpleasantness and cosmic horror. A short novella of subterranean terror seen through the eyes of an ageing engineer and a young hoodlum. One a pillar of the local community, the other an outsider who wouldn’t know communal spirit if it ran up and bit him on the bottom.

Another story in the Scaeth Mythos. A world where reality is not what it seems. There is more than any of us know. Some of it’s miraculous, some of it’s hideous beyond imagining. There is, of course, structure. Boundaries and dividing lines. Walls.

The walls are thinner than we realise.

Writing The Bledbrooke Works

Writing The Bledbrooke Works was a hugely enjoyable process. The story is a combination of real experience and several spooky ideas which had long fascinated my warped imagination. The base idea for the setting stems from a visit to a nearby town. I’d never been there despite the proximity. It was a brief stop at a small place that was indefinably unsettling.

I could never really put my finger on the reason. Maybe it was the somehow suspicious demeanour of the locals. Possibly the oddly pewtered quality to the light on those streets. It could have been an old and vaguely alien smell in the air. I still can’t say for sure. What I did know was that I didn’t belong. It felt like lingering would be unwise. Unhealthy. Dangerous.

It was an ideal home for something ancient and awful from another dimension. And a pretty good place to locate a fatberg. The former features in much of my writing and the latter is so perfectly loathsome that it definitely deserves a spot in a quietly cosmic horror story.