Kathleen Kaufman – författare

“I am the stuff of your nightmares…You have been writing my name on the walls of your fear your entire life.”

When seven-year-old Jamie falls down a very long hill, he finds himself trapped in a world of strange creatures, harsh landscapes, and near-perpetual darkness. Lost and confused, Jamie is desperate to get home. The nightmares, fears, and all manner of what-ifs that inhabit this shadow world are unfamiliar to him―all except one: the Lairdbalor, Jamie’s personal nightmare, once relegated to his dreams. In this fantastical land, however, the Lairdbalor and all the fears and nightmares of children are very real.

But Jamie’s nightmare is different. It is the sum total of the anger and anxiety that imprisoned him in his former life, and it threatens to consume and rule the nightmare realm, a place where time passes differently. With each slumber, Jamie finds himself inexorably changed. The farther he travels through this terrifying world, the better he understands the one he left behind.

Crossing genres of folklore, horror, fantasy, and magical realism, The Lairdbalor is a story for anyone who lives with anxiety and fear and has ever wondered, “what if?” It is the story of a child not meant for children and a darkly imaginative meditation on life, death, fear, and the nature of reality.

“I am the stuff of your nightmares . . . you have been writing my name on the walls of your fear your entire life.”

When seven-year-old Jamie falls down a very long hill, he finds himself trapped in a world of strange creatures, harsh landscapes, and near-perpetual darkness. Lost and confused, Jamie is desperate to get home. The nightmares, fears, and all manner of what-ifs that inhabit this shadow world are unfamiliar to him—all except one: the Lairdbalor, Jamie’s personal nightmare, once relegated to his dreams. In this fantastical land, however, the Lairdbalor and all the fears and nightmares of children are very real.

But Jamie’s nightmare is different. It is the sum total of the anger and anxiety that imprisoned him in his former life, and it threatens to consume and rule the nightmare realm, a place where time passes differently. With each slumber, Jamie finds himself inexorably changed. The farther he travels through this terrifying world, the better he understands the one he left behind.

Crossing genres of folklore, horror, fantasy, and magical realism, The Lairdbalor is a story for anyone who lives with anxiety and fear and has ever wondered “what if?” It is the story of a child not meant for children and a darkly imaginative meditation on life, death, fear, and the nature of reality.

At this, the Cailleach would release a single drop of indigo dye onto the topmost layer. See, she would tell her daughter. See? It bleeds through the topmost path and onto the next. In this way, so many things from the next world touch ours, and our world touches the layer beneath.

High above the sea, hidden in the rocky Scottish cliffs, something stirs. An ancient matriarchal power has set the wheels in motion for a long line of descendants. But to what end?

Spanning centuries of human history, these daughters of the lowland hag, the Cailleach, must navigate a world filled with superstition, hatred, violence, pestilence, and death to find their purpose. With pasts half remembered and destinies denied, the daughters of Cailleach are women with uncanny, and often feared, abilities to heal, to see the future and to cause great destruction and pain when threatened. With each passing generation, the waves crash against the shore, and the Cailleach awaits a homecoming that will bring everything full circle.

Diabhal (Devil) is the story of cults, exorcisms and the devil in 1980’s era Los Angeles. Ceit Robertson, age ten, is the next Matrarc to the Society, a cultish, matriarchal group living in an inconspicuous cul-de-sac in Venice Beach. When Ceit’s mother is attacked by spirits from the old world, a failed exorcism results in Ceit’s exile into the foster care system in Los Angeles. She eventually lands in the infamous MacLaren Hall, a very real and historically auspicious center for disturbed and abandoned children in El Monte, CA. Diabhal is the sympathetic story of the devil in Los Angeles. The exploration of the true nature of evil and how intention colors what our definition of wickedness truly is. Ceit grows into a force of nature, as she contains the potential and mythology of the darkest degree, but discovers that perhaps the devil is not what we should truly fear.

Sinder weaves together the parallel stories of Ceit, grown to adulthood and having taken her rightful place as Matrarc of the Society, and her great-grandmother, Ainsley Robertson in 1924 Ireland, and the inception of the community that would come to inhabit Sinder Avenue.

In 1996, Venice Beach, Ceit struggles with the confines of superstition and tradition that have defined the Society since its start. As her younger brother, Alan, turns eighteen, Ceit enacts a plan to end the Society for good. And in doing so, releasing Alan from what she sees increasingly as a toxic and antiquated way of life as well as freeing herself from her mortal ties to the human realm.

In 1924, Ainsley Robertson lives in a secluded community outside of Cork, led by her father, an abusive and cruel ceannaire. Ainsley’s story opens with her expecting a baby in a world where being an unwed mother is a criminal act. Ainsley grows to realize her own gifts and connection to the world of the fae as she navigates a world dominated by dogma and oppression. As the sparks of what will become the Society grow to a flame, Ainsley becomes the Matrarc of her people, leading them to a new world, and a new tradition.

Ten years after the city of Los Angeles is nearly destroyed by a violent domestic terrorist attack, Esther Robertson struggles to reconcile her father’s culpability as leader of the deadly Son of Abraham cult. She grants CBS’s top reporter, Cooper Carlson, a rare interview and insight into her father, Alan Robertson, who sits awaiting trial for his crimes in federal prison.

A report of a horrific and seemingly natural disaster interrupts the interview. Another will follow and another after that. Are these increasingly violent and bizarre phenoms truly natural, or is there another force behind them?

In the epic conclusion of the story of the Society at Sinder Avenue, the end times–put into motion by a demonic deal made generations ago–are finally unfolding. Destruction, famine, war, and pestilence reign. But is it God who comes to answer the prayers of the suffering and dying world, or is it Ceit Robertson, the ascended matriarch of the Society, Goddess of the Dead, and Ruler of the Night Forest? Will they offer salvation or Armageddon?