Night Babies
On sale
23rd April 2026
Price: £24.99
The haunting new folk horror novel from Lucie McKnight Hardy
‘All my fears have vanished, and I realise now that my dreams were not nightmares but a sign of what was to come, how this will end. An inevitability.’
Things were looking up for Astrid Aspden and her partner, Kit, until their house flooded. With Astrid’s first solo art exhibition just weeks away, her paintings are ruined and excitement has turned to despair.
She is thrown a lifeline when her best friend Flora invites her to stay in a run-down chapel she and her partner, Sim, are renovating in the Brecon Beacons. As Astrid and Kit settle into their new surroundings to salvage her work, they soon learn about the unsettling history of the chapel and what lies beneath the nearby reservoir.
As the weeks go by, tensions simmer between Astrid and Flora as sour memories flare up from their teenage past and deep wounds are laid bare from an ill-fated school trip to Florence. Her relationship with Kit begins to fray as the chapel and the surrounding hostile beauty of the valley begin to intrude on their lives.
Astrid throws herself into her work but the longer she spends in the chapel the more she begins to notice things: handprints on her paintings, shadowy figures reflected in the reservoir and voices whispering in the night. As the darkness of the Welsh valley closes in on Astrid, will she be able to run from the looming horror or be consumed by it?
Whether it is the past, the otherworldly, or the truth – they all haunt this menacing and claustrophobic novel.
‘All my fears have vanished, and I realise now that my dreams were not nightmares but a sign of what was to come, how this will end. An inevitability.’
Things were looking up for Astrid Aspden and her partner, Kit, until their house flooded. With Astrid’s first solo art exhibition just weeks away, her paintings are ruined and excitement has turned to despair.
She is thrown a lifeline when her best friend Flora invites her to stay in a run-down chapel she and her partner, Sim, are renovating in the Brecon Beacons. As Astrid and Kit settle into their new surroundings to salvage her work, they soon learn about the unsettling history of the chapel and what lies beneath the nearby reservoir.
As the weeks go by, tensions simmer between Astrid and Flora as sour memories flare up from their teenage past and deep wounds are laid bare from an ill-fated school trip to Florence. Her relationship with Kit begins to fray as the chapel and the surrounding hostile beauty of the valley begin to intrude on their lives.
Astrid throws herself into her work but the longer she spends in the chapel the more she begins to notice things: handprints on her paintings, shadowy figures reflected in the reservoir and voices whispering in the night. As the darkness of the Welsh valley closes in on Astrid, will she be able to run from the looming horror or be consumed by it?
Whether it is the past, the otherworldly, or the truth – they all haunt this menacing and claustrophobic novel.
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Reviews
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