A Horror Trilogy
Calix Sanguinis
The dead remember everything. And some of them never stopped.
by G. Carrion
Three connected horror thrillers. One forensic pathologist who has been bitten and survived. A network of nests that has been hunting across continents since the Mongol invasion of Rus in 1237. And the 789-year-old priest at the center of it, who has been waiting.
Dr. Rafael Volkov is a forensic pathologist. Half Brazilian, half Russian, fluent in three languages, divorced, meticulous to the point of obsession. He is the man you call when a death does not fit the pattern. In December of the first book, an FSB analyst in a closed Russian industrial town calls him for a consultation on twelve miners who have vanished. The polar night begins in three days. What Rafael finds in the bodies has no name in any medical textbook — and by the time the book is finished, neither does he.
Calix Sanguinis follows one man across three continents and eight centuries of secret hunting. A Siberian mining town under a two-month night. The Candomblé houses of Salvador and the rainforest interior of Bahia. A fictional Calabrian village, a forbidden archive on Mount Athos, and a cave outside the former city of Ryazan, where a priest walked into the dark in December 1237 and never fully came back.
These are non-Hollywood vampires — the upiry, from pre-Christian Slavic folklore. Hairless, pack-hunting, communicating in clicks and hisses. They are not the whole story. Older things are watching from the edges of the trilogy: something in the rainforest that predates Portuguese; something in the Russian cave that predates Konstantin himself. The world is bigger, older, and more patient than any one hunter can hold.
The trilogy is historically grounded, adult, and propulsive. It is a story about fathers who kept their work secret from their children, about the cost of listening to the truth without agreeing to it, and about what a man owes the generations of his family who did the work before him — and what a woman owes herself when she decides her career is over for a man whose body has begun to change.
Read in order
The Books
The three books are one story. Read them in sequence: Book One, Book Two, Book Three. Each book has its own case and its own resolution, but the larger arc only reveals itself if you read them in order.
Book I of 3
Severobor
Some winters never end.
Dr. Rafael Volkov is a forensic pathologist from Massachusetts — half Brazilian, half Russian, fluent in three languages, divorced, still carrying a case he missed a year ago. He is the pathologist you call when a death does not fit the usual patterns.
In the first week of December, a Russian FSB analyst named Natalya Voronova calls him to consult on twelve miners who have vanished from a closed industrial town on the Taymyr Peninsula. The polar night begins in three days. The bodies Rafael examines in the local morgue are not the work of any carnivore in any textbook.
Impossible blood loss. Feeding marks arranged with precise care. A Nganasan elder who has been waiting fifty years for someone to ask the right question. A sealed Gulag-era tunnel broken open from the inside. And in the dark of an abandoned camp ten kilometers from town, something that clicks like cicadas and bones cracking — and that knows every victim’s name before it takes them.
Book II of 3
The Second Coast
His father knew. His father never told him.
Five months after Severobor, Dr. Rafael Volkov steps off a plane in Salvador, Bahia, with a piece of seven-hundred-year-old parchment in his pocket and a body that no longer quite belongs to him.
In the fishing villages of the Bay of All Saints, fishermen are dying in a pattern the local police are calling a drug cartel. In the Pelourinho house where Rafael’s father was born, his aunt Tia Marta has been waiting eighteen years to tell him what her brother really did with his life. Bruno was a hunter. He hunted the thing in the bay for forty years, four times, and died without telling his son.
Rafael meets a Candomblé mãe de santo who has been waiting thirty-nine years to tell him how much his father loved him. And in the rainforest interior of the Paraguaçu valley, in the ruins of a Jesuit mission that vanished in 1712, something older than the chain is watching from inside a strangler fig.
Book III of 3
The Hollow Priest
Some doors only open once every fifty-two years.
In the mountains of Calabria, a village called Pietralta has been keeping a secret since 1246. In a sealed archive on Mount Athos, a letter written eight hundred years ago names the only human being who has ever struck a bargain with the thing in the Russian cave and walked back out.
And in a limestone chamber above the upper Pronya valley, fifty kilometres south-southwest of the city the Mongols burned in the winter of 1237, a priest who has been waiting seven hundred and eighty-nine years is about to explain what Dr. Rafael Volkov is turning into, and why.
Father Konstantin does not snarl. He does not threaten. He has spent eight centuries in silence, waiting for a man who can listen without interrupting — and when Rafael walks into the second chamber of the cave, Konstantin offers him the one thing the trilogy has been circling from its first page: the truth. The names of every hunter in Rafael’s bloodline. What the cave is. And what it finally costs, at the end, to refuse to trade the truth for complicity.
Also in this world
Companion Novellas
Standalone horror novellas set in the same universe. Each one can be read cold, without any prior knowledge of the trilogy.
Companion Novella
The Second Mission
They carried axes into a country that had been listening for three hundred years.
Book Details
Companion Novella
The Grim
Sixty-eight families. One priest. A debt his predecessors stopped paying.
Book Details
Companion Novella
Milk Teeth
Three children gone. Two armies in a forest older than both. One old woman who remembers what the village stopped paying.
Book DetailsWho is in this story
The People
Forensic pathologist
Dr. Rafael Volkov
Half Brazilian, half Russian. Thirty-six at the start of Book One. Divorced, still carrying a case he missed a year ago. Clinical, precise, dry-voiced. By the end of the trilogy he will no longer be entirely what he was when it began — and he will know what he is becoming down to the year.
FSB analyst
Natalya Voronova
Thirty-four. Daughter of a KGB officer who never told her what he really did. Russian-accented English, dry humor, long silences. She is not a damsel and she is not a love interest. Book Two gives her her own impossible choice; Book Three gives her a chamber to walk into alone.
The oldest thing in the chain
Father Konstantin
A Rus’ Orthodox priest who walked into a forest cave in December 1237 and never fully came back. Seven hundred and eighty-nine years old at the trilogy’s climax. He does not snarl. He does not threaten. He speaks four languages, never raises his voice, and has been watching Rafael’s family for four generations. He is the most dangerous thing in the world because he is patient and articulate.
For readers of
Justin Cronin’s The Passage · Christopher Buehlman’s The Lesser Dead · Paul Tremblay’s A Head Full of Ghosts · Adam Nevill’s The Ritual
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