C.N. Harrow's Blog

Finally done!, just in time for Halloween!..

I have as of today finally relased my next book, book 5 in the blackwood journals..

A gothic classic decent into dread and madness, this time in Boston 1834 and Deep South 1825, frame as a narrative based on House of fall of Usher.

I am so excited about this and I hope you will like the book as much as I did making it!..


The Blackwood Journals
A Game of Fortune:

Boston, 1834. Lord William Ashcombe’s fortune has collapsed, his family disowned him, and his only hope lies in a secret gaming room beneath the city, where wagers are whispered in blood, not coin.

There he meets a haunted storyteller from Louisiana and the object that binds their fates: a mirror carried from the witch trials of Salem, now awakened and hungry.

From Boston’s counting houses to the voodoo-soaked bayous of the American South, Ashcombe discovers that every debt demands payment, and some accounts are written in flesh.

A dark historical novel of ambition, guilt, and supernatural justice, A Game of Fortune continues the acclaimed Blackwood Journals saga, weaving Gothic horror with the haunted morality of The Scarlet Letter and the unease of Beloved.

As I was sitting and editing, refining my next book, I came across an odd problem for me… I have not been exposed to a Southern drawl…

Only from what I can hear from movies and YouTube. So here is my dilemma, how do I write a Southern drawl?

Captain’s Log: July 1st, 2025

The sea forgets. The ship remembers.

Tonight, The Red Wake sets sail.

After seven editorial voyages, through storms of repetition, calm patches of doubt, and one last great stillness, she is finally ready to leave the dock.

Ninety-one thousand words carved in dread and shadow. This is not a tale of war or triumph, it is a slow descent into mist, memory, and the quiet horror of being forgotten.

To those early readers who stood with me on the creaking deck, your lanterns burned when mine sputtered. Thank you for your faith, your sharp eyes, and your kind cruelty.

Now, if you hear the groan of rigging in the night, or see a fog that moves against the wind… it may already be too late.

She sails tonight.

May she haunt well.

C.N. Harrow

They say journals are meant for the living to confess, remember, and anchor one’s mind. I’ve come to believe mine was never meant to leave Ashcombe Manor.

And yet, here it is scattered across pages, now bound and priced for the curious.

If you enjoy the kind of horror that doesn’t leap, but lingers, the type that waits in the corner of your mind long after the fire has gone out, you may find something within The Blackwood Journals that speaks to you.

Perhaps even watches you.

Available now on Kindle for £0.99 / $0.99 for a limited time.

https://mybook.to/FV0uC

And if you do read it… leave a word. Let me know when the house lets you out.

They say an empty house is just bricks and dust.
But I’ve always thought otherwise.

Every empty room remembers. Footsteps linger longer than they should. A breath held in the walls. Ashcombe is no different—it’s not the ghosts that stay, but the weight of every soul who’s passed through and left something behind.

I’ve spent years wandering haunted pages and dusty folklore books. What fascinates me isn’t the dead—but the living shadows they leave behind.

Tell me… have you ever walked into a room and felt like you weren’t quite alone?

The manor is always listening.

— C.N. Harrow

There is something uniquely unsettling about silence — not the peaceful kind, but the kind that hums just behind the wallpaper. That was where Ashcombe began.

When I first envisioned The Blackwood Journals, I didn’t set out to write about ghosts. I set out to write about what remains — the grief, the echoes, the questions never asked aloud.

Ashcombe Manor is not real, and yet, in many ways, it is more real than some places I’ve stood in. I’ve walked its halls countless times in my mind. I know where the wallpaper peels, where the mirrors sit crooked, and where no one dares to knock.

The story of Dr. Blackwood came from my fascination with rational minds confronting irrational dread. He is a man of medicine haunted not by what he sees but by what he refuses to believe he has seen.

This blog will serve as my dimly lit study — a place where I’ll share glimpses behind the writing, the folklore that shaped it, and perhaps even some tales too strange to fit into fiction.

So come in. The fire is lit. The manor awaits.

– C.N. Harrow