◆ Pre-order · 4 October 2026
The Grotto
Languedoc, 1228. A crusader lord raised to believe his violence was holy, and the friar who arrives in his valley and will not leave.
He had planned nothing; a man does not plan the thing the body does ahead of him.
The Book
Languedoc, France, 1228. A work of queer historical fiction set against a world coming apart — two men finding each other inside it, and refusing to let go.
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The World
Meritorious brutality.
The Lauragais, in the Languedoc of southeastern France, is mountainous country that in 1228 still carried the marks of the Albigensian Crusade — a campaign so brutal the land itself seemed written in blood. The chronicler Pierre des Vaux-de-Cernay framed that bloodshed as redemptive: the blood of the heretic and of the martyr alike, a theology the scholar Penny Cole named “meritorious brutality.”
Renaud was raised inside that theology for twenty years, taught that what he did in the Crusade was holy. As the novel opens he has been lord over the land he helped subjugate for nine years. The Grotto asks what two decades of sanctified violence do to a man — and to the people now in his charge — when something he was never taught to expect arrives, and refuses to leave.
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