Night Babies

Night Babies is a perfect psychological folk horror, where the internal landscape of its protagonist and the external landscape of the Brecon Beacons join together to become an uncanny piece of art. This is a story that carefully unravels its subjects, in which old sins cast long shadows and something dark is always lurking just beneath the surface

A considered, clever, creeping ghost story, with dark depths and dangerous undercurrents. Lucie McKnight Hardy is one of the best writers of the uncanny around

Lucie McKnight Hardy is the Queen of Dread

Night Babies is a wonderful novel; dark, disturbing, devastating. Lucie McKnight Hardy at the height of her uncanny powers.

Night Babies had me in its dark clutches from the very beginning. A beautifully written and cleverly constructed literary ghost story, exploring truth and perception in the eeriest of manners

A modern classic of the folk horror genre

You don't know the water's encroaching , but all of a sudden, Lucie McKnight Hardy has dragged you beneath the surface , and you are in an inescapable maelstrom of foreboding with an intense sense of imminent horror. There is no escape , you must read in. This story sticks to you like bitter black treacle

Night Babies is an utterly compulsive, pitch-black slice of folk horror. In hyper-focused artist Astrid Aspden, Lucie McKnight Hardy has created a fascinating, unlikeable, yet utterly sympathetic puzzle-box of a protagonist, capable of keeping her past - and her present - opaque to the reader until the very end. And what an ending: gory, viscous, vicious, and so damn compelling! Wow

Reading this book is one long, slow, watery descent into uncanny territory. A Welsh chapel and the surrounding reservoir hold murky secrets, and so, we come to realise, do most of the characters. As in Water Shall Refuse Them, McKnight Hardy's rural setting diverges from the pastoral to become a place of mounting dread. The protagonist, artist Astrid is obsessed with capturing the strange landscape. In doing so, she suffers from temporal discombobulation to the extent that her own testimony becomes unreliable; she is haunted both by supernatural beings and her own questionable choices. Like pentimenti in oil paintings, past mistakes rise inexorably to the surface. Lucie McKnight Hardy is the queen of atmospheric folk horror

[A] claustrophobic folk horror . . . Expect figures looming in the shadows and whisperings in the night

Night Babies is an immersive and compulsive novel about art and ego, betrayal and consequences. Beautifully written and absolutely gripping

[An] unsettling and totally compelling journey into nightmarish dread . . . Lucie McKnight Hardy crowns herself queen of the uncanny with this exquisite chiller that has echoes and flavours of Robert Aickman, Daphne Du Maurier and Ira Levin

A sophisticated, chilling tale that works both as supernatural and psychological horror