The Marionette's Curse

By: Riding, Samuel F. H.

When red-and-gold banners appear on a battered pier, the Royal Pavilion promises harmless spectacle: Professor Grimaldi, clockwork wonders, marionettes that dance as if alive. By nightfall, the town understands what "as if" costs. Children wake with faint rings at their wrists, humming yes to an unseen cue. In kitchens and bedrooms, the stage repeats itself-knife for knife, scarf for scarf-while the theatre bell tolls toward nine.

June Whitmore has only small tools: a kettle's whistle, a mother's voice, a boy who wants to be brave. With Sam's palms turning slack and the town falling into step, June hunts the mechanism behind the curtain-a feed line of wire and will-and gathers allies who can do the wrong thing loudly enough to matter: a schoolteacher who bans counting songs, a vicar who conducts blasphemies, a rigger with raw hands and a conscience.

As banners promise "Last Night," June must choose between running and cutting, between witness and refusal. The Marionette's Curse is a coastal folk-horror about mothers and neighbours, about how towns save themselves-with noise, with names, and with tools that bite. The show leaves; the echo stays. And sometimes survival is simply learning to count wrong together.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: B0FTWZGRQP
• ISBN13: 9798268376814
• Release Date: October 2025
• Publisher: Independently Published
• Length: 150 Pages
• Weight: 0.40 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.3" x 5.5" x 8.5"