The Village of the Hanged

What it is about

What if your grandmother's warning were a matter of life and death? When the narrator falls in love with Lena, a Romanian woman, he has no idea what he's getting into: a village at the foot of the Carpathians that people in the surrounding area know by only one name — the village of the hanged. At first it's just small things: a cat that flees from his new girlfriend, noises in the apartment that nobody can explain, an invisible lodger the two of them soon call only “the Hairy One.” But the deeper he sinks into his new family's life, the clearer it becomes: a curse more than a hundred years old lies over this place. The Village of the Hanged is a true story about love, family, and an evil that doesn't vanish just because you refuse to believe in it. Book 1 of the Carpathian Chronicles.

It starts with small things, the way these stories always do: a cat that leaves a room the moment Lena enters it. Peanuts that suddenly have eyes. A basement apartment in Germany where something knocks with no hand behind it. Only later does the road lead to the village, and there the narrator is a guest – and guests ask the questions the locals stopped asking long ago, because they know the answers and live by them.

There are footsteps circling the bed at night and three knocks at a door with no one behind it. But what is truly uncanny comes before all that: a family with rules it never explains. A woman you love whose origins carry a price. And a place that has stopped counting its dead.

Based on true events

The book is a first-person account. The narrator lived through a large part of it himself; the rest was told to him by people he trusts – family members, neighbors, witnesses who were there. The village exists: an ordinary municipality at the foot of the Carpathians that the people around it still call only the village of the hanged.

Names and routes have been altered in the book, out of consideration for the people who still live there. Everything else – the customs, the rules, the order in which things happen – stands as it was told. Anyone who wants to test how solid that ground is will find the traditions set out one by one, with sources, in Legends & Customs.

The folk belief behind the story

The Carpathian Chronicles do not invent their superstition. They draw on a tradition still lived in Romania today – openly in some villages, half-hidden in others. Three of the customs that matter in the book are explained in full here:

Sample chapter

The opening pages are available as a PDF – no sign-up, no email address. If you would rather stay in the world a little longer first, the Carpathian glossary collects the terms the book uses.

Book 1 and Book 2

The Carpathian Chronicles are written as a series. The Village of the Hanged opens it; Stafii – Uncanny Voices in the Night picks up a year after the first book came out and goes deeper into the dark the first book only touched. Both are published on the same day. Book 2 can be read alone, but you lose the rules Book 1 establishes – and Book 2 relies on them.

Editions and languages

The book is out as an ebook in seven languages: German, English, Romanian, French, Spanish, Italian and Portuguese. Each edition is translated in its own right, not passed through a machine. The book is available at all major retailers. The price shown applies to the eurozone; retailers in other countries charge their own local prices.

Frequently Asked Questions

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