How the Dead Hopped Home

They call them Walkers. By day they pray. By night they move bodies - actual bodies, hopping stiff-legged across the Silk Road, yellow talismans glued to their foreheads to keep their souls in place.

A Taoist monk's job is simple: get the corpse home before sunrise. The hard part is what the corpse remembers, what it wants, and who it knew while it was alive.

Twelve stories. Twelve walks. Twelve forty-day journeys to a gate where someone is - or is not - waiting.

A merchant murdered by his own uncle, dragged toward the home he can no longer call his. A scholar who died at his desk with a letter still sewn into the lining of his robe. An old widow who walked thirty years across the salt-flats not to forgive her husband but to be sure he was truly dead. A bandit chief whose mother refuses his return, with spears at the gate. A master whose brush has begun to fail.

Beneath every walk: the four men who would inherit the master's bell, and have not yet been told which of them will.

How the Dead Hopped Home is a folk-horror anthology in the late-Han Silk Road tradition - twelve linked novellas in a single volume, written in the propulsive style of a thriller and the atmosphere of a Pu Songling tale. Volume One of an open-ended series.

For fans of Joe Abercrombie's bleak craft, the early Witcher anthologies, Pu Songling's Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio, Lee Child's pacing, and any horror reader who has ever wondered what walks beside the long road at night.

28,000 words. Twelve episodes. One bell.