In 1983, experimental artist Tony Mathias began work on a new installation – it was to be a collage of visuals and sounds collected at an abandoned RAF base called Warden Fell. Various stories and rumours swirled around the place but Tony was interested only in the echoes of history. But soon after visiting the site to tape-record the sounds there, he returned to the caravan where he was staying with his family and killed his wife, his two children and then himself. Another dark twist in Warden Fell’s history?
But the past reaches out. Decades later Cally Darker, gets the chance to investigate the terrible story and perhaps even solve the mystery – a fantastic exclusive story for her true-crime podcast.Tony’s actress sister Stella is desperate for the mystery to be solved before she dies will do all she can to help and passes on the tapes left behind by her brother. But before long, Cally realises that Warden Fell has a far older and darker story to tell. Be careful what you listen to…
Dark bleatings, my spooked tribe! I have a novel from Daniel Church to talk about today, and it’s a belter of a horror story that I really enjoyed.
Cally is a woman in her twenties, with a history of depression, that lives with her boyfriend Iain. They are polar opposites. She has mental health struggles and he doesn’t believe that anxiety really exists. She runs a true crime podcast, and rather than being supportive, he finds it morbid and weird and discourages it. Things go south for them when Cally receives a tip off about a cold case that she somehow has never heard of, and her focus shifts to a mystery about a loving man that killed his family and then himself, for apparently no reason.
What Church gives us in this story is a real battle of power, and of courage pitted against fear. Cally is an interesting, complex character that keeps interesting, complex company, and getting to ride along with her during this particular patch of her life was as intriguing as it was exciting. The more she learns about the murderer, Tony, the more she wishes she’d never started investigating this particular case. It isn’t like anything else she’s ever dug into, that’s for sure.
Church’s worlds tend to be ours, but with something extraordinary bursting out of them, and this story certainly lived up to my high expectations. The hook is already interesting enough, but what he decided to do with it pushed it up a few notches. Thematically, it’s so rich with subtext and parallels that I’ll be thinking about it for quite while. My main takeaway was the idea of inner conflict – struggling with elements of yourself, and also things about you that you feel don’t belong there, and how to handle that. There’s no such thing as a surface level read when it comes to this author.
I also very much enjoyed that there are Welsh characters and locations, because I basically never come across that.
I suppose in the interest of fairness, I should tell you why this wasn’t a perfect read for me, and it’s merely because it features dreams. In case you’re new here, I have an unfathomably childish hatred of them, for no real reason, and it irks me when they’re used. This isn’t a reflection of the story really, because they’re not used very much and they all serve a purpose, but I just can’t be doing with them, my sonny jims.
Overall, I loved it and would wholeheartedly recommend it to horror fans who enjoy splicing body horror with true crime and supernatural elements. If you’d like to check out the book or the author, I’ve popped some links below for you.
The Sound of the Dark will be released in the UK on the 28th October, 2025.
Bleeeeat!
Happy Goat Horror 
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