Supernatural horror, speculative fiction, political grotesque and the occult detective story. My stories frequently begin with an object that should not exist: a missing gospel, a forged genealogy, an obsolete machine, an unmarked grave, or a photograph taken before its subject was born.
The Vale Archives
Impossible Provenance
Dr Judith Vale is a historian of things that should not quite exist. An academic by training and an investigator by necessity, she specialises in damaged archives, disputed manuscripts, occult traditions, false histories, and those rare objects whose provenance appears to contradict accepted reality.
Judith is neither magician nor conventional detective. Her principal tools are scholarship, textual criticism, scepticism and an unusually high tolerance for ambiguity. Sometimes the explanation is fraud. Sometimes psychology. Sometimes institutional secrecy. Occasionally, none of these are sufficient.
What happens when an idea, object or story refuses to remain safely in the past?
Judith Vale Investigates
The Filing Cabinet and the Ghost
A biography that refuses to settle. Born in Saint-Malo, or Portsmouth, or nowhere anyone can remember. An Anglo-French writer, photographer and digital artist traced through archives, book fairs, photographic restoration, and the discrepancies she kept investigating after being told they did not matter.