When Flynn and her friends decide to spend the night in the house up on the moors with a very strange history, their night of drinking and teenage shenanigans spirals into a nightmare. Forced into a strange place, and now having to make strange choices, the once tight-knit group rips at the seams.
Then Jackson falls to his death.
With the days that come, Flynn finds herself trapped in Temple Fall, as though she never left the house. The secrets of her family past consume her, and she is haunted by the spectre of a Victorian woman. Losing time and seeing things that aren’t there, Flynn must rebuild the group of friends so they can grieve together.
Because while they escaped Temple Fall, the house didn’t let them go …
Why we’re excited about this book:
Readers are about to become very familiar with R.L. Boyle. Hailing from Leeds, Boyle is the author of the Bram Stoker nominated The Book of Baku. With her latest, Boyle gathers together a broken group of friends trapped in a sinister house that refuses to let them go. Ronald Malfi (Small Town Horror) says: “The Gothic vein pulses strong in Boyle’s latest, where a cursed cast of characters, one-by-one, meet their untimely fates, and where all the trappings of Victorian horror are polished and made modern. Notable for Boyle’s keen ear for dialogue and chilling descriptions. Strongly recommended.” Clay McLeod Chapman (Kill Your Darling) says: “The parched halls of Temple Fall feed off the reader like the best modern haunted houses out there, making this black-as-pitch book a worthy addition to your bookshelves alongside the likes of David Mitchel’s Slade House and Marcus Kliewer’s We Used to Live Here.“, and Andrea Morstabilini (A Blood as Bright as the Moon) says: “A clever, mind-bending, frankly terrifying haunted house mystery, Temple Fall will delight fans of Mike Flanagan’s TV infestations … It serves up delicious scares and sinister, hallucinatory set pieces, but it’s the emotional truth at the center of it that’s going to haunt readers the longest: there’s nothing in life perhaps more frightening than those fleeting, burning years when you stop being a child but you are not an adult yet, and the future feels like a black maw ready to eat you up.”
Releasing from Titan Books 17 February 2026, Temple Fall by R.L. Boyle is available for pre-order now.
BOB PASTORELLA