The First-Foot Stranger: A Dunmere Rites Novella

In Dunmere, every holiday belongs to a monster.

Frances Rooke arrives on New Year’s Eve intending to do three things: inspect the crumbling house her estranged great-aunt left her, decide what it’s worth, and get off the island the moment the tide uncovers the causeway.

Then she finds fresh bread in a dead woman’s kitchen.

Salt beneath every threshold.

And one final instruction waiting for midnight:

Open the door only to the dark-haired stranger carrying bread, salt, coal, and a coin.

Hale is already waiting outside.

Barefoot in the sleet. Beautiful in a way no ordinary man should be. His skin shines like wet coal, his body carries the heat of a banked fire, and no matter how bitter the cold becomes, he refuses to cross Frances’s threshold until she invites him in.

Because something else is already trying to enter Rooke House.

Something hungry.

Something that knows exactly which voices Frances will answer.

Trapped together until dawn, Frances must decide whether Dunmere’s oldest New Year’s rite was meant to keep monsters out—

or invite the right one in.

The First-Foot Stranger is a darkly romantic folk-horror novella featuring an isolated island village, an inherited haunted house, an ancient winter ritual, a protective nonhuman hero, and a guaranteed happily-ever-after.