What Lurks Beneath the Hare Stone

There is something different about working on a second book in a series. With What Walked the Boreen, the first book in the Blackwater Mysteries, I was discovering the world as much as I was telling the story. I was finding the voice, the atmosphere, the characters, and the strange space where mystery, folklore, and horror could coexist.

Now I'm drafting The Hare's Wound, and I'm beginning to understand what the Blackwater Mysteries might actually become. And I think that's both exciting and a little intimidating. Because The Hare's Wound isn't simply another rural mystery. At least, I don't think it is.

One of the things I keep coming back to is the Hare Stone legend. In another story, the folklore might be there to make the setting feel eerie. An old legend. A strange stone. A story the locals tell visitors after dark. But that's not what I want it to be here. The legend is part of the machinery of the story. The community has taken something real and terrible and transformed it into something safer. Violence becomes legend. A complicated history becomes a story with heroes and villains. The truth becomes something people can live with.

And that idea reaches across generations. The historical hare-witch incident. Aine's death. The attacks happening in the present. They aren't separate events. They're connected by the stories people tell about them.

That may be one of the things I find most fascinating about this book. The mystery isn't only about what happened. It's about what people believe happened. And sometimes those are two very different things.

Aisling's investigation reflects that in a very personal way. She isn't simply trying to solve a crime. She is confronting the possibility that her own memories have been rendered unreliable—not because she is incapable of remembering, but because others have repeatedly told her that what she remembers isn't what happened. That makes the investigation much more painful. She's not just fighting for answers. She's fighting to trust herself again. Her professional scapegoating creates another layer to that. The same social machinery that convinces someone to doubt their own memory can also convince them to doubt their own competence.

And suddenly, the mystery becomes about disbelief. Who gets believed? Who gets dismissed? Who gets to decide what the truth is? Those questions feel much more frightening to me than simply asking who committed the crime. Then there is Cathal.

I don't think I've written an antagonist quite like him before. He isn't someone who sees himself as evil. That's what makes him disturbing. Cathal understands himself as a protector. He believes he is preserving family peace. He is repeating a choice Mairead made before him, convinced that intimidation, silence, and control are justified if they prevent something worse.

But protection can become possession. Peace can become silence. And eventually, the line between protecting someone and destroying them can disappear completely.

That makes his eventual role in the story much more tragic than a straightforward villain reveal. He's not simply someone who wants power. He's someone who has convinced himself that what he is doing is necessary. And that's much harder to dismiss.

Aine is another reason this story has stayed with me. She is dead before the novel begins, but I don't want her to exist merely as a dead sister who motivates Aisling's investigation. I want the reader to know Aine as a person. Through her belongings. Through memories. Through fragments. Through the things she left behind. Through the way other people remember her.

Her absence should be felt, but she shouldn't be reduced to her death.

In some ways, The Hare's Wound is an attempt to recover Aine. Not physically, of course. But as a person. That's important to me.

And then there are the hares. The animal killings. The old stories. The things that happen around the Hare Stone.

The moments that feel like they shouldn't be possible. I like that I don't necessarily have to answer every question. One of the things I want to preserve in this book is ambiguity.

Maybe there is something supernatural happening. Maybe there isn't. Maybe the folklore is nothing more than superstition passed down through generations. Maybe it is something older and stranger.

I don't want to close the door completely in either direction. I want the reader to finish the book and still wonder. Because sometimes the uncertainty is more frightening than the answer.

And then there is Dingle itself. I've realized that the setting in this book isn't really a setting. It's a character. The town has its own behavior. Its rituals. Its gossip. Its politeness. Its professional authorities. Its family loyalties. Its silences.

All of those things become part of the machinery that protects secrets. That's something I find increasingly interesting about small communities. A secret doesn't necessarily survive because everyone agrees to hide it. Sometimes it survives because everyone agrees not to look too closely.

And that brings me back to what I think makes The Hare's Wound distinctive. It's the combination. Folk horror. Family mystery. Institutional gaslighting.

Those three things don't normally occupy the same space, at least not in the stories I've read. But here they seem to belong together. The folklore provides the language people use to explain the past. The family mystery reveals what was actually lost. And the institutional gaslighting shows how easily people can be persuaded to distrust the person who remembers differently.

Maybe that's what I've really discovered while drafting this book. The Blackwater Mysteries won’t be only about solving crimes. They're going to be about the stories people tell themselves to survive what happened.

And sometimes, those stories are more dangerous than the truth. What Walked the Boreen opened the door. Now The Hare's Wound is taking me somewhere deeper. I'm still drafting it. I still don't know exactly where every path leads. And perhaps that's appropriate.

After all, this is a story about people who have spent generations walking around the truth without wanting to look at it directly. Maybe the best thing I can do as a writer is keep following the trail even when I don't entirely like what I find at the end.