PENTLOCKIN
About
Complete at 75,000 words - representation and film-rights inquiries welcome.
Pentlockin — A psychological horror that traps its reader inside an urban legend.
Brynn Evesham questions the dead.
Her mother, gone for years. Her favourite aunt, buried only days ago.
And now, Walter Crimp, the former executioner at Pentlockin Prison.
Except Walter Crimp, known as The Gallows Man since the night the inmates who feared him took their revenge, answers back through whispers, obsession, and the promise of release.
Following a warning from a stranger in the cemetery, and desperate to repair her fractured bond with her father, Brynn begins to research the origin of The Gallows Man — the urban legend said to rise when the guilty go unpunished.
Grief and injustice intertwine with a mysterious symbol, a canary that draws her into a spiral of discovery. She learns that a headline riot in 1955 ended Crimp’s life, but the reason remains buried deeper than her trauma, reachable only at a price.
Determined to debunk the legend, Brynn’s investigation unravels into something far darker than folklore.
The deeper she digs, the further she falls. Each revelation tightens the noose around her work, her sanity, her life.
Grainy videos, origin clues, and desperate calls for help lead her back to Pentlockin, where Crimp still holds the key to survival or surrender.
As the walls close in and history begins to repeat itself, Brynn must decide whether to expose the story or become part of it.
All she wanted was closure. What she found was him.
A grave awaits. Crimp’s, Brynn’s, or yours.
Pentlockin dismantles the mind through dread, illusion, and guilt. It’s not a story you simply read. It’s a story that rewrites itself around you.
Every scene shifts meaning when revisited. Details dismissed as background reappear as evidence. The book uses narrative sleight-of-hand and recontextualisation to implicate the reader in its horror.
At its heart is Walter Crimp: part legend, part memory, executioner, judge, horror returned.
Readers of Gillian Flynn, Jennifer McMahon, and Neil Gaiman will recognise the psychological depth and mythic undertone. Fans of The Green Mile, Fight Club, and The Haunting of Hill House will find the same moral unease and devastating emotional pay-off.
Concept mock-up created for visual reference.
Praise for this book
“One of the most emotionally intelligent horrors I’ve ever read.”
My brain is still in limbo. I have NO clue what is actually real or not real. Like, it could go either way but it works SOOOO WELL
“As someone who never reads horror, I was stunned by Pentlockin. I was drawn in from the first page and terrified alongside Brynn. The ending had me questioning everything I thought I knew. This story refuses to leave my mind.”
A haunting, elegantly written psychological horror that grips from the first page and never lets go. With lyrical prose, mounting dread, and twists that linger long after the final reveal, Pentlockin is an unforgettable descent into fear and obsession.