How the Dead Hopped Home: Volume One — Stories of Corpse Walkers

They call them Walkers. By day they pray. By night they move bodies - actual bodies, hopping stiff-legged across the Silk Road, yellow talismans glued to their foreheads to keep their souls in place.A Taoist monk's job is simple: get the corpse home before sunrise. The hard part is what the corpse remembers, what it wants, and who it knew while it was alive.Twelve stories. Twelve walks. Twelve forty-day journeys to a gate where someone is - or is not - waiting.A merchant murdered by his own uncle, dragged toward the home he can no longer call his. A scholar who died at his desk with a letter still sewn into the lining of his robe. An old widow who walked thirty years across the salt-flats not to forgive her husband but to be sure he was truly dead. A bandit chief whose mother refuses his return, with spears at the gate. A master whose brush has begun to fail.Beneath every walk: the four men who would inherit the master's bell, and have not yet been told which of them will.How the Dead Hopped Home is a folk-horror anthology in the late-Han Silk Road tradition - twelve linked novellas in a single volume, written in the propulsive style of a thriller and the atmosphere of a Pu Songling tale. Volume One of an open-ended series.For fans of Joe Abercrombie's bleak craft, the early Witcher anthologies, Pu Songling's Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio, Lee Child's pacing, and any horror reader who has ever wondered what walks beside the long road at night.~28,000 words. Twelve episodes. One bell.