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By E.L. Ravenheart
Publisher: Independently published
Print Length: 187 Pages
Genre: Historical Supernatural Fiction / Gothic Horror / Anthology
Between the northern forests and the Somerset moors, ancient boundaries are failing.
In the deep woods of the Great Lakes, skeletal spirits hunt the arrogant. Shapeshifters guard what remains of the wild. Hunger transforms the soul with a single choice. Across the Atlantic, on mist-shrouded moorland where leylines pulse through peat, a barefoot girl walks for two centuries, keeping a covenant her family refused. At standing stones, trickster ravens teach threshold lessons. In dark pools, witnesses become bridges between worlds.
And in the concrete spaces we call safe—nursing homes, apartment complexes, locked rooms—older hungers wake and feed.
The Shadow Keeper weaves Indigenous Chippewa mythology with British gothic folklore into ten interconnected tales of transformation, sacrifice, and the terrible price of keeping balance. Drawing on ancestral storytelling traditions and the haunted landscapes of Somerset, E.L. Ravenheart crafts atmospheric horror where memory carries power, shadows have intent, and every doorway leads somewhere unexpected.
The boundaries are thin. The keepers are tired. And hunger never sleeps.
The opening collection in the Powers of St. Katherine's House cycle.
Excerpt
THE LITTLE GIRL OF THE SOMERSET MOORS
There is a place on the Somerset Levels where the mist refuses to lift. Where water and earth blur into indistinguishable mud, where ley-lines throb like infected veins beneath soft ground, and where yew trees crouch over the dead like ancient midwives attending a birth that will never end.
The locals don't speak of it much anymore. There are older stories—Roman stories, Celtic stories, stories that predate the Romans and the Celts both—but those have been buried so deep beneath layers of rational thought and modern skepticism that few remember them now. Fewer still believe.
But the land remembers.
The land always remembers.
In the Year Without Summer, when crops failed across Europe and hunger gnawed at the belly of the world, the Somerset Levels grew particularly thin. The boundary between what is and what was began to fray. And in that fraying, old agreements stirred.
The Thornley family had lived on the moors for generations. They were practical people—farmers, mostly, with a streak of stubbornness that came from generations of wresting life from reluctant soil. They did not believe in the old stories. They did not believe in covenants or Keepers or the things that moved in the mist when the sun went down.
They had a daughter. Seven years old. Bright-eyed and curious, with dark hair that caught the light like water. Her name was Elspeth.
One night, the elders came to the farmhouse. They came in the dark, moving through the mist like it was a familiar path. They spoke in low voices about tradition and duty and the old agreements that bound the land to the people and the people to the land.
They spoke about Keepers.
"No," Elspeth's father said. He was a modern man, educated in the city, returned to the moors with ideas about progress and reason. "No. That's superstition. That's the past. We don't do that anymore."
"The land doesn't care what you believe," the eldest said quietly. "The land cares what you owe."
But Elspeth's father refused. He packed his family's belongings in the dead of night. He loaded them into a cart and drove toward Glastonbury, toward the inn where they might find shelter and safety and distance from the old stories.
The mist followed them.
It came rolling in thick and wrong, smelling of peat and ancient decay. It wrapped around the cart like a living thing. Voices spoke backwards from within it. Lights pulsed with a rhythm like breathing, casting shadows in directions the moon didn't occupy.
And in the mist, shapes moved. Tall and impossibly thin, with joints that bent in too many places. They moved with purpose. They moved with hunger.
At the inn in Glastonbury, the mist found them in their room. It pressed against the windows. It seeped beneath the doors. It whispered in voices that sounded almost like people—almost like the dead.
"Give us a Keeper," the mist said, "or we will take all of you."
Elspeth's mother wept. Her father raged. But they both knew, in the way that people know terrible truths, that the mist would not be denied.
Elspeth looked up at her parents, at their desperate faces, at the way they were breaking beneath the weight of an old agreement they had tried to escape. She was seven years old. She was innocent. She was exactly what the mist wanted.
"I'll go," she said.
Her parents tried to hold her. They tried to keep her. But the mist was already wrapping around her, already pulling her toward the window, already beginning the transformation that would make her something other than human.
She looked back at them once, just once, as the mist carried her away.
She never saw them again.
The Shadow Keeper
HERE
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E. L. Ravenheart is a gothic fiction author whose work blends psychological depth, atmospheric tension, and the quiet, uncanny edges of the supernatural.
With roots in the Indigenous Chippewa Nation (USA), Ravenheart draws on a cultural inheritance rich in story, symbolism, and reverence for the unseen. This heritage infuses the work with a mythic undercurrent — where the natural world speaks, memory carries power, and the boundary between the living and the spirit realm is never absolute.
Relocating to the United Kingdom in 2012, Ravenheart now writes from Weston-super-Mare, where the haunted coastlines, ancient landscapes, and layered histories of Somerset intertwine with Indigenous storytelling traditions.
The result is a distinctive gothic voice shaped by two worlds: the ancestral and the adopted, the wild and the weathered, the remembered and the half-forgotten.
Ravenheart is developing a growing literary cycle that begins with six interconnected novellas and culminates in the debut novel, The Powers of St Katherine’s House. Across this cycle, the fiction explores liminal spaces — between memory and myth, faith and fear, identity and the unknown — crafting narratives where atmosphere becomes a character and the past presses insistently against the present.
When not writing, Ravenheart can often be found delving into the deep history and folklore of Somerset, a practice that echoes through the emotional intelligence and character-driven focus of the work.
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