I’m delighted to be sharing an except of Sharon Bradshaw’s latest release, The Legend of Henry Petch, a tale of werewolves, the paranormal, and an obsessive love that endured across the centuries.

Blurb

Ben is more interested in getting his hands on Elias Hepworth’s fortune, along with the benefits of being a hippy in 1970, than heeding the warning left behind by legend and folklore. As he indulges in free love, and takes psychedelic drugs.

He doesn’t believe in ghosts, and can’t decide whether Henry Petch had the power to turn himself into a werewolf during the eighteen hundreds or was suffering from lycanthropy.

Nevertheless, when the Wolf moon appears in the sky above the Yorkshire dales, everyone else in the village of Leatham continues to follow the tradition of lighting a candle. So that Old Henry will go on his way, without harming them.

A creepy tale of werewolves, the paranormal, and an obsessive love that endured across the centuries. The Legend of Henry Petch is Book 1 in The Dark Side of Folklore series. It can also be read as a standalone novella.

Excerpt

Prologue

I took what was left of the pelt. It was bitterly cold on the snow and ice, and an extra layer would keep me warm. It wasn’t going to be of any use to the creature it had belonged to, torn where the others had mauled its carcass. There wasn’t much food at this time of year so only natural for hunger to be the strongest instinct, and the few of them that were left to turn on each other.

As I pulled the pelt across my back and shoulders, I knew that the spirit of my brother wolf wouldn’t begrudge me having it. A close relationship between the pack and my family, the Petchs, had grown over the years. They left our hens and sheep alone, if we didn’t try to kill them. Maybe this was the one my great grandfather saved, which had been the start of it. He rescued the pup from a steep valley where it had fallen, then left it safely at the top. Stranger things had happened in the Yorkshire dales I knew as a boy, when I listened to the stories told around the fire at night, and this was an old wolf from the look of its carcass.

Nevertheless, I was unaware of just how much wearing the pelt would change me. Until it was too late, and I had become one of them. The creature’s memory began to run with me, if not in soul but spirit. I found myself following its instinct and ways, but it was never quite the same. The others in the pack were still wary of me. When I followed their tracks I had the sense to keep my distance. Concerned for my own life. Whether this should be as a wolf or mortal man, I felt confused by then as to which it was.

I wore the wolf’s skin whenever I went out at night to hunt for food. In the darkness and shadows where the light of the moon couldn’t reach, I knew that I could easily be mistaken for one of them. Instead of the lost creature I had become, trapped somewhere beneath all of this with the soul of the man I still sometimes heard, crying out in a low howl. Desperate to recover the scattered fragments of mortality, to be as I once was, the real Henry Petch. With Anne whom I would never stop loving, and desired more than a single breath of this half-life.

The jealousy and anger that this could no longer be raged within me, as I ran after what had become my destiny. The last wolf to roam the Yorkshire dales across the centuries. So that no one would forget these wild and noble creatures, or deny the right they had to be here. All the while hearing Anne’s whisper in the wind, as she called out to the man I once was: “Neither the heart nor eternity can be denied when the truth of love is in blood and bone, the essence of us. You and I felt that magic… Henry, my love.”

The Legend of Henry Petch is available via this
Universal Link

Read a review of The Legend of Henry Petch here.

Sharon Bradshaw

Sharon Bradshaw is a Historical Fiction Author, Storyteller, and Poet. She enjoys reading books about the folklore of the British Isles, and its archaeology.

You’ll find her delving into the 8th century to write the Durstan series, set on Iona and Lindisfarne, and the paranormal for her Ghosts From The Bazaar series. She is also a freelance ghostwriter, and book coach. Helping others tell their stories.

Sharon lives with her family and a large collection of books, near Warwick Castle in the UK.

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