Chris Norris

I’m in the final proof checks for Huldravolk – publication date is Monday, June 22, 2026. This full-length novel is the next chapter in the story of Hugh Bannister and his world – what I’m hoping someone, someday, might call “The Bannisterverse.” (I’m not sure it’s cool for the author to apply a tag like that themselves. But I’ve done it now!)

It’s a sequel to the first novel I wrote, Hartslow, but quite a different book in many ways. Hartslow was a story about politics as much as the occult, with a broad, potentially world-ending scope. Huldravolk is shorter, simpler, and more procedural. It’s a tale of something nasty on the loose in a bucolic rural setting and a desperate scramble to catch it before more people get hurt.

In other words, it’s a throwback to the horror stories of my youth, the ones that used to sell in W.H. Smith for under £1.50. Reliably packed with sex, violence, and gore and typically weighing in at under 200 pages, they were the ideal diversion for long summer days in those halcyon, pre-internet years. Authors like Guy. N. Smith or Graham Masterton could churn out as many as three or four novels a year. At that level of productivity, it’s fair to say that plot and characterization was light. But they shifted copies at a rate that most modern-day writers couldn’t come close to matching.

There’s a little bit of a meta aspect to Huldravolk. It’s quite possible that a fictional teenage reader in 1976 Yorkshire (or an adult one, for that matter) might have been sitting down to enjoy Night of the Crabs, Werewolf by Moonlight, The Manitou, or James Herbert’s The Rats, even as another horror story was unfolding around them. And then, 50 years later, that story would be written as a tribute to the books of that era.

Not all of those seventies and eighties shockers have stood the test of time. But if you get a chance, seek out Graham Masterton’s The Wells of Hell or The Devils of D-Day. They are classics.