In the shadowed corners of panel-block apartments, fog-bound coastal villages, and forgotten forest outposts, death leaves more than silence behind. M. Crowmoore's Retained: Extracts from the Cleaner's Archive collects the quiet, meticulously documented reports of an unnamed estate cleaner, a professional who sorts through the interrupted lives of the recently deceased.
What begins as routine remediation work: cataloguing possessions, disposing of the unclaimed, preparing properties for strangers, steadily uncovers something deeper: handwritten journals, almanacs, dictated tapes, and fragmented logs that refuse to stay buried. Ordinary spaces and ordinary people brush against the strange, the lingering, and the unexplainable. A locked apartment. A vacant flat that was never truly empty. A notebook left open on a kitchen table. A ranger station at the edge of the world.
Spare, atmospheric, and unnervingly precise, these extracts build a portrait of a vast, weary region where the bureaucratic and the uncanny sit uneasily beside each other. Crowmoore renders the mundane rituals of clearance with the same care as the growing sense that something is watching from the stairwell, the water, or the margins of the page.
For readers who love slow-burn literary horror, subtle weird fiction, and stories that linger, Retained is a haunting dossier of lives interrupted and truths half-glimpsed.
The archive is open.
The reports are here.
Enter at your own discretion.
