I know them, these hills.

In the foothills of the Green Mountains, a child grows up in an abandoned village, haunted by memories of his absent parents. In a wayside tavern, a murderous innkeeper raises a young girl among the ghosts of his past victims. Elsewhere the village of Whistler’s Gore is swept up in the tumult of religious fervor, while in rural Falmouth, the souls of the buried dead fall prey to a fungal infestation. This is New England envisioned by Hawthorne and Lovecraft, a twilit country of wild hills and barren farmland where madness and repression abound.

14 stories of doubt and despair, haunter and haunted, the deranged and the devout. Introduction by Simon Strantzas.

“Reading the stories in this wonderful debut collection from Daniel Mills is like waking into an older, haunted America. The God of the Puritans holds sway, with terrible power and terrible beauty. The night is wondrous with spirits. Though these stories bear the influence of Hawthorne, Lovecraft, and Palliser, the numinous dread fills them is his alone. Mills recalls to us America's own dark wood, and it is lovely to behold.”

— Nathan Ballingrud, author of North American Lake Monsters

“The Lord Came at Twilight is silk-smooth and as dark as the shaft of an off boarded-over mine. Mills takes us to that place and drops us in. He’s kind enough to flash the lamp light down upon us now and again, so we can glimpse the claw-marks on rock, the bones, the moving shadows…A terrifically affecting collection.”

— Laird Barron, author of The Croning

“The stories in Daniel Mills’s excellent collection have their roots in the grand tradition of the American Gothic that begins in Poe and Hawthorne and flows through such descendents as Chambers and Ligotti. Tales in the truest sense of the word, these narratives range through the styles and conventions of their predecessors, but in a way that is distinct from mere pastiche, however loving. Instead, these stories inhabit the modes of the past as a means to approaching a profound darkness, one physical and metaphysical. A pleasure to read, Daniel Mills’s fiction would draw approving nods from any of the austere presences in whose literary footsteps he is following.”

— John Langan, author of The Fisherman

“Mills has a poetic and visionary style of his own, capable of uncovering the beauty in horror and the horror in beauty. He has Lovecraft's ability to evoke awe and wonder, but he avoids the old writer's hysterical edge and tendency to adjectival excess. The Lord Came at Twilight is a significant and sophisticated contribution to modern weird fiction.”

— Reggie Oliver, author of The Sea of Blood