Quaint Folk

“To experience Karella’s cheerfully unhinged fiction is to surrender to a spectacularly fierce and uncompromising literary force. A bold, potent brew of all the best elements of folk and queer horror.” —Eric LaRocca, author of Things Have Gotten Worse Since We Last Spoke

Quaint Folk is an unapologetically queer and thrillingly subversive take on folk horror like you’ve never seen before, from Bitter Karella, the Bram Stoker- and Shirley Jackson Award-nominated author of Moonflow. 

Welcome to Hasenhurst. The right sort of family would do well here. 

From the outside, it looks like Jessica has the perfect life. She’s a stay-at-home mom, married to a man with a respectable job, raising a son they adore. Her family is as wholesome as apple pie. But deep down, Jessica knows there’s something wrong with her; she knows she can’t escape her past. 

When her husband’s job has them move abroad, Jessica thinks this is her chance for a fresh start. On the remote island of Hasenhurst, the modern world can’t get in. The people there grow their own herbs, make their own jam, and mind their own business. They believe in folk tales and the power of dreams. They’re a quaint, quiet people. 

Jessica is determined to be the right kind of person for a family—and a life—like this. But as she tries to befriend the townsfolk and learn their ways, she soon realizes that beneath the town’s idyllic nature, something sickly sweet and rotten lays buried…

• "To experience Karella's cheerfully unhinged fiction is to surrender to a spectacularly fierce and uncompromising literary force. Quaint Folk astonished me with its charming, mythical weirdness threaded with genuine moments of pure tenderness. A bold, potent brew of all the best elements of folk and queer horror."
  Eric LaRocca, author of Things Have Gotten Worse Since We Last Spoke
• “Quaint Folk is the folk horror I always wanted: queer, funny, bloody, and outrageous in the best way. I had an absolute blast!”
  Laura Cranehill, author of Wife Shaped Bodies
• “Deliciously arch in its portrayal of a British everyvillage, Quaint Folk is never anything other than wildly entertaining—and very sad, and hopeful, and dark. Bitter Karella asks: how much would you pay for the perfect jam bap? And what if the price were your deepest and most authentic self?”
   
  Ally Wilkes, Bram Stoker Award-nominated author of All the White Spaces
• “Imagine a cozy Wicker Man with shades of Twin Peaks, told in the barbed voice of a horny Mary Poppins, and suffused with a high Donnie Darko creep factor, and you might just come close to envisioning the wonder that is this horrific, witchy, jiggery jam of a book. I loved it.”
  Andy Davidson, author of The Hollow Kind
• “A heaving Hieronymus Bosch acid trip that skins the idyllic flesh off the folk horror subgenre and paints the reader's face in its blood."
  Clay McLeod Chapman, author of Devil Inside