Pre-order · Oct 2026
The Grotto
Languedoc, France, 1228. A land left scarred by the Albigensian Crusade — and two men finding each other inside a world coming apart, refusing to let go.
A work of queer historical fiction. Pre-order this October — the first three chapters are readable now.
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Releases Oct 2026. Pre-ordering early helps the book land on launch day — and you’ll have it the morning it’s out.
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.