C**k

The cottage was perfect. The baby was perfect. Everything was perfect.

That should have been her first warning.

Taylor Cartwright has already survived the worst: a miscarriage, a marriage worn down to its last thread, a grief so total she forgot what hope felt like. So when her husband Jamie takes her to a remote Cotswolds cottage to heal, and something in her finally, impossibly, begins to mend — she doesn't ask questions. She just breathes. Laughs. Falls pregnant again.

Then the c**k arrives.

Bone-white. Black-eyed. Inexplicably, impossibly beautiful.

What follows is a life more perfect than Taylor ever dared imagine. A husband reborn. A daughter thriving beyond all reason. A farmyard Eden sealed off from the world, where the mornings never end and the love never runs dry.

She doesn't notice the rot creeping in.
Doesn't hear the flies.
Doesn't ask what's buried at the bottom of the garden.

She's too busy living the dream.

C**k is a suffocating descent into grief, maternal obsession, and the devastating lies we build inside our own minds to survive the unbearable — literary horror for readers of T. Kingfisher and Paul Tremblay.

The dream was perfect.
Then the c**k crowed.