The Dark Willow

Joe Abercrombie meets Andrzej Sapkowski in a grimdark fantasy of noir investigation and ancient rural horror.

In Elenda, violent and traumatic deaths can give rise to the Invited: grotesque creatures that haunt the land and feed its darkest superstitions. Entire rural communities live under the constant threat of monstrous transformation.

Kendarian Molino was once a respected investigator. Now a disgraced civil servant, he is quietly exiled to Raven Valley to look into the disappearance of three young women. The case carries little political weight — just enough to require an official report. No one expects answers. Least of all the people who live there.

Returning to the valley he fled as a child, Kendarian is forced to confront the past he tried to bury: his father’s death at the hands of an Invited, the suffocating silence of the village, and the oppressive presence of the Dark Willow, an ancient entity whose influence seems to be spreading.

As the investigation advances, it mutates into something far more disturbing. Magic seeps through the cracks of reality, the boundaries between myth and crime begin to dissolve, and Kendarian must face not only a growing conspiracy, but his own moral decay.

Visceral, lyrical and deeply unsettling, The Dark Willow introduces Mauro Caffarato as a powerful new voice in Spanish dark fantasy: ambitious, uncompromising and impossible to classify.