Early Reviewers

Light Come, Light Go is a literary folk horror novel set on the Isle of Portland, a limestone island off the Dorset coast of England, told across two timelines six and a half centuries apart.

In 1999, recently divorced William Delaney moves to the island with his two daughters, hoping its history might give him a book to write. In 1348, a sailor named Galfridus returns home to find the Black Death has reached Portland before him. As plague consumes the medieval community, something older moves alongside it, and seven centuries later, the Delaneys discover the island has not forgotten what it holds. Both timelines are drawn toward the same stone, the same buried ground, and the same white-haired girl who exists, impossibly, in both.

The novel's chapters are named for the actual geological strata of Portland stone, descending from Rubble at the surface to the Basal Shell Bed below — a structural conceit that mirrors the book's central preoccupation with deep time, with what the earth preserves, and with the past's refusal to stay buried. It is a slow-burn, atmospheric work concerned with grief, generational guilt, folk magic, and place as a living, hungry presence.

Written in the tradition of Andrew Michael Hurley, Sarah Waters and Alan Garner, Light Come, Light Go is a debut novel and the first title from Saltbone Press. It asks what is owed to a landscape that remembers everything, and what it costs to disturb it.