The Northern Weird Project Books in Order

The Northern Weird Project is a shared novella project rather than a single continuing story. It brings together six short horror works by writers based in the North of England, with the North treated as setting, subject and, at times, a force in its own right.

These are compact books, but they are not slight. Each novella takes a familiar northern place or concern and lets something strange take root there: rail lines, moors, villages, old houses, coastlines, local stories and the uneasy gap between what people know and what they would rather ignore. Folklore matters, but so do modern pressures such as isolation, grief, money, environmental change and fractured communities.

Matt Wesolowski’s contribution, (Don’t) Call Mum, follows Leo as he tries to get home to the North East village of Malacstone. A disrupted train journey turns increasingly wrong after an unintended passenger boards, the train stops in the middle of nowhere, and someone disappears. A tale Leo heard as a child begins to feel less like a story and more like a warning.

It is a bad night for a train to break down.

The project does not ask readers to follow one set of characters from book to book. Instead, its connection is place, mood and a shared interest in the uncanny. One novella may lean toward ghost story, another toward folk horror, psychological dread or a creature feature. That variety makes the series a good fit for readers who like horror in small, concentrated doses without needing to commit to one long plot.

The setting is the common thread. The North here is not a postcard version of rolling hills and rain. It is lived-in, funny, harsh, ordinary and occasionally frightening. Old stories survive in train stations, peat bogs, empty roads and family memories, while contemporary life keeps moving around them.

You can read the novellas in any order. Start with (Don’t) Call Mum if you want a tense, folklore-soaked journey with a tight cast and a claustrophobic setting. From there, the wider project offers more standalone visits to northern places where something old, hungry or simply wrong may be waiting nearby.