Light Come, Light Go
The Black Death came to Portland in 1348. It never quite left.
Portland. A limestone island off the Dorset coast, tethered to England by a single road and a thread of pebble beach. Three prisons. Ancient quarries. Six hundred years of secrets buried in the rock.
In 1999, William Delaney arrives with his two daughters, fleeing a collapsed marriage and hoping the island's history might inspire a book. What none of them expect is the island to reach back.
In 1348, a sailor named Galfridus returns home to find the Black Death has come ashore before him — carried, perhaps, by his own ship's crew. As the plague moves through the community, something older and stranger moves with it.
Seven centuries apart, two families are pulled toward the same stone, the same crack in the earth, the same white-haired girl who will not stay dead.
Layered like the island's own geology — from Rubble on the surface down through Kimmeridge Clay to the Basal Shell Bed below — Light Come, Light Go is a novel about what the ground beneath us holds: the dead, the past, and the things that refuse to become either.
For readers of Sarah Waters, Andrew Michael Hurley, and Alan Garner.
Advance praise
"Light Come, Light Go is an exceptionally strong folk-horror offering. Castle weaves a tapestry where history is not just a collection of dates, but a heavy, hungry entity embedded in the very stone of the island. An author to watch in 2026."
— Advance reader, StoryOrigin
From the opening of the novel
"Steep sunlight and shadows on stone. Grey and white and a yellow mottling of dry moss. Bones. Corpse dust, shell and bone rolled under the weight of a lost ocean, accreted, compressed, repeated, driven deep. Soft now on her hard fingers as she traces the pits and ridges. Not yielding soft but worn to a gentle grain. An almost audible scratch of her skin below the wind.
"Bones is rocks," she says to nobody, lifeless words, reciting. "Mud is flesh."
It is history she feels there, weathered but not lost. Its grime pooled soft into craters and pores, the detritus of the world clinging there. Clinging to that miniature landscape, itself just a glimmer, the surface echo of an interior unseen.
"And we's the fleas, then."
Her fingers linger, teasing the textures for meaning. "
Forthcoming · 1 September 2026
Paperback (ISBN: 978-1-0666857-0-7) & ebook (ISBN: 978-1-0666857-1-4). ISBNs registered with Nielsen UK.
Content notes
Plague and bodily decay. Child in peril. Supernatural violence, including decapitation. Some animal harm in a ritual context. Depictions of grief and mental decline.
About the author
N.L. Castle writes from a stretch of the Dorset coast where England gives way to the sea. Light Come, Light Go is the debut novel.