Mornec

A Cosmic Horror Novel of Carpathian Vigil and Arrested Life

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Filip Hrehuš keeps bees in a clearing above Mornec, a mountain village in the Slovak Carpathians, and knows the forest around him better than he knows most people. He is the first to hear it going quiet.

The honey is what he and his mother live on, and the hives are the one part of his life that has always given back what he put into it. This October the hum inside them is wrong. In the youngest colony, the one he raised this year, the comb stands perfect and every cell is dry. The bees that are left are still moving. None of it is work.

The hives are only the first thing. Through the last weeks of October the valley goes on changing, a little at a time, from the forest floor to the sky his grandfather taught him to name. For every change Filip finds a reason. By November the reasons have run out. And the old trouble he has carried since boyhood, the one that has never had a name, is coming back.

His mother, Katarína, has been ill since the spring and has not been past the doorstep in weeks. As far as she knows, the valley is still the one she was born in. Filip keeps the stove fed, the lamp lit, and himself between his mother and the window.

A slow-burn novel of literary cosmic horror, MORNEC is the story of a son and his mother, told by a man who has spent his life reading one small piece of ground, in the autumn it stops answering to anything he knows.

For readers of Jeff VanderMeer’s Annihilation, Andrew Michael Hurley’s Starve Acre, and John Langan’s The Fisherman, and for anyone drawn to the rural dread of Central European folk horror.

Book Two of the Quiet Ends series. Each novel stands alone.

“My grandfather used to say the land remembered. He did not explain what it remembered.”

Details:

• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Michal Polgár
• Publication date ‏ : ‎ November 1, 2026
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• Print length ‏ : ‎ 324 pages
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-82-694333-1-9