The Dark Scripture Cycle (Paperback)

The Dark Scriptures Cycle is a collection of five novellas of religious horror that reimagine sacred texts through cosmic dread, spiritual corruption, and the quiet terror of being seen by something that is not God.
Each story mirrors a strand of religious tradition - what is taught, heard, written, remembered, and seen - and asks:
What if revelation is not salvation, but contamination?
From cloistered convents and New England parishes to an English chapel, a crumbling Italian shrine, and a modern lab, faith itself becomes the vessel of horror.
Inside this collection:
Catechism – what is taught
In a remote convent, Sister Immanuela watches the Mother Superior grow frail but fervent, obsessed with obscure apocrypha. The sisterhood’s quiet routines sour into new rituals as their devotion realigns toward something old, dark, and disturbingly sacred. Immanuela must choose between the purity she vowed and a corruption wearing the mask of divine truth.
The Glossalith Psalms – what is heard
In Bethel‑on‑the‑Wilderness, a plain New England parish builds a meeting‑house and finds an older stone already waiting on the green. The village begins to receive small psalms from the stone - providences that ripen into a liturgy of braided ropes, buried names, and a hymn of seven verses. As wonders grow intimate and strange, Reverend John Harrow struggles to preach against a gate that may be a god, while his flock quietly decides what to believe.
The Black Gospel – what is written
Renovating a disused English chapel, Callum breaks through the wrong wall and finds a sealed alcove - and a book that seems to drink the light. Brought home to his fiancée Naomi, and her lapsed‑believer brother Joel, the volume reveals itself as a parasitic scripture: a Black Gospel. The more they read, the more the text adapts - prophesying their town, stealing unaccounted hours, and showing different words to different eyes. As storms rise over their flood‑prone parish, they must decide whether to suppress a revelation already rewriting them, or accept their place as characters in a gospel that asks whether refusing horror can be its own kind of faith.
Tradition – what is remembered
Architectural historian Jonah Marks travels to a Ligurian village to survey a cliff‑backed shrine and its relic: the Rock of Remembrance. Polished by centuries of pilgrims and stories of visions and stigmata, the stone is just folklore - until Jonah touches it and dreams of martyrdoms in searing detail. In old ledgers and a friar’s journals, he finds lives the Rock has quietly “collected.” As the village watches, Jonah feels a terrible pull to lay himself down as one more remembered life on a stone that never forgets suffering.
Scotomata – what is seen
After losing his partner and his faith, Micah works in a Neurospiritual Studies lab, cataloguing near‑death experiences he no longer believes in. The usual tunnels and warm lights give way to something stranger: patients around the world describe the same “room of cold light” and backward chanting. As Micah’s dreams begin to match their visions, and a worn‑out priest hears the same reversed liturgy in his confessional, it becomes clear this may be contact with a non‑human witness. When Micah undergoes an experimental session, he confronts a universe where every life is perfectly recorded - and the thing that keeps our names may never choose to save us.
The Dark Scriptures Cycle is for readers who love religious and theological horror that takes faith seriously; cosmic dread in churches, convents, and small towns; slow, escalating unease rather than jump‑scares; and character‑driven stories where belief, doubt, and devotion are all dangerous.
If you’ve ever wondered what might be listening when you pray - or what might be writing you down when you die - step into the dark between scripture and silence.