The Harm

A novella. Cover art by Ben Baldwin.

There were three of them then, Tyler, Roarke and Potter, and they were each eight years old: three young boys on the cusp, not yet aware of the darkness that lies at the heart of the world; children more at home with games and fantasy than hard reality. The day that fused these two states – when a nightmare became real life – changed them forever.

But all that happened much earlier, in the Autumn of 1980. This is what came later, long after the fact. Rather than the details of the incident itself, this story consti­tutes the results of the harm.

“Gary McMahon is the baron of bleak, the godfather of grim... and I mean that in a good way. The Harm is a distillation of the essence of true horror. As uncompromisingly confrontational and as arbitrarily vicious as real life can sometimes be, The Harm casts a bright light onto the deepest recesses of the human soul and encounters nothing but endless darkness.” – Mark Morris