Life Returns by Kyle Toucher

Life Returns. An essential step into Toucher’s world of Walpurgis County, where an insane mountain broods over its minions, and superstition intervenes…

Its title taken from the classic Dr. Know song of the same name, Kyle Toucher’s short novella Life Returns offers a look into domestic strife complicated by occult interference.

After the sudden death of their parents, Ian Emerson and his young sister Annie begin a new life with their Aunt Mary and Uncle John in mysterious Walpurgis County. It soon becomes evident that Aunt Mary―who had shunned the children for years―harbors a valid reason for such prolonged detachment. Uncle John, a man dedicated to his obsessions, has laid a nefarious plan for their future, one of servitude and agony.

On the windblown threshold of winter, a final confrontation takes place in the benighted, freezing basement of the house on Gethsemane Lane. With Annie in one hand and the power of The Shadowless Ones in the other, Uncle John revels as a tear in reality―the Shimmer―opens, and an ancient, throbbing mechanism, The Machine, asserts its will…

But aunt Mary has had enough.