Out Now!
Escape Castle Dracula
So! What’s this about? It’s a gallivanting journey through Gothic literature and wider horror stories, a gauntlet of trials weaving together the ghoulish tales of Dracula, Jekyll & Hyde, The Invisible Man, Frankenstein, The King in Yellow, The Yellow Wallpaper (not the king’s attempt at redecoration), The Hound of the Baskervilles, The Phantom of the Opera, The Raven, Macbeth, The Picture of Dorian Gray, Doctor Faustus, and The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.
How does it work? Every spread is a different puzzle, and me and Adam Allori did our very best over about three years to make sure these are puzzles you’ve never seen before, telling a tale never told, with monsters as accurate as possible to their original literary text — unless we thought of something cooler in the moment…
No wordsearches, no split-page spot-the-differences, no one-way-out mazes or jumbles or anagrams or drawing lines between columns. No pen will touch the page: this adventure plays out in your mind and in Mr Allori’s gorgeous artwork! We designed it like a videogame restricted to 14 still images, calling to mind the game logic you might find in series like Resident Evil, Monkey Island, Portal, and Professor Layton.
We’ve also packed the book with references to our favourite horror books and films, tales we couldn’t spend a whole double-page on, so keep an eye out for easter eggs and callbacks to popular adaptations!
P.S. If you’re struggling to find a certain shiny thing in Sleepy Hollow, pop me an email. You’re the lucky owner of a First Edition and its unique print mistake: an art file lost in digital publication, fully restored to all current and future printings!
Releasing 18th September 2025…
Where the Dead Live
Alright, Sam, so Escape Castle Dracula didn’t unleash enough fear on bookshops around the world? Now you’ve persuaded Templar Books to let you profit off the ultimate horror of horrors, DEATH ITSELF?
Eh, sort of. But also, no.
This one isn’t about death. It’s about the dead. You know, the full population of humans that have come before us? All of them? The people who kept us all going, led to us being here. Because they’re not gone, and they’re not scary. We love them, we remember them, we make space and time for them, live among them and for them and tell tales of their experiences, loud and quiet. And this book is about how.
The first section tours a world of celebrations, marking time in cultural calendars for festivals and processions and rites and performances, from Samhain to Dama to Gai Jatra and many more.
The second section, that’s an exploration of tombs and catacombs: Xunantunich, the Paris Catacombs, Okunoin, the Pirate Cemetery off Madagascar…
And the third section? That’s the oldest tales ever told, the legends of the afterlife that kept the very earliest civilisations remembering their loved and lost: Asgard, the Duat, Hades, Xibalba, Kur.
All of this, interspersed with breakout spreads featuring global ghost stories, elemental funeral rites, the lost graves of mythic figures, forensic science for criminal investigation, bodysnatching, undersea cemeteries…
So, what is it? To paraphrase a rather morbid scientist you might’ve befriended in Escape Castle Dracula: my dear Reader, it’s aliiiiiiiiive!
