Winter is the season when the old ghosts stir. The cold settles into our bones, the nights stretch long and the past whispers.
Of all my stories, Cribbins is possibly the one most tangled with whispers of buried trauma, unspoken truths and the unsettling ways the past can seep back into the present.
At its core, Cribbins asks one simple, unnerving question: What if the haunting isn’t just in the house, but in the body itself?
Sophie, the protagonist, is diagnosed with Multiple Sclerosis (MS), a condition where her own body attacks the protective sheath around her nerves. Her sensory symptoms are agonisingly real: numbness, a crawling fire beneath her scalp, electric tingling in her hands and feet, and a crushing tightness around her ribcage (known as the MS hug).
But Cribbins entwines Sophie’s neurological symptoms with the ghostly assaults of Ronnie Cribbins – her long-dead neighbour – until she can’t tell one from the other.
Is she relapsing? Or is she being stealthily attacked by Cribbins?
Is her nervous system misfiring? Or is Cribbins touching her?
Beneath the haunting lies a truth Sophie has spent her entire life avoiding. A traumatic childhood event she buried so deep her mind locked it away for survival. But memories don’t stay buried forever – they push, they break through, they claw their way back. And for Sophie, they return in the form of a haunting.
Her story becomes a three-component war…
- A supernatural war against Cribbins, a predatory spirit intent on violating and destroying her.
- A physical war against her own body as MS tears through her nerves.
- A psychological war against the memories she’s kept locked away for decades.
The boundaries between spirit, illness and trauma collapse, revealing a single monstrous truth: Cribbins isn’t just a ghost, he’s also the disease, the trauma and the memory she can’t escape.
Using the framework of a classic ghost story – a haunted house, a malevolent spirit, a terrorised protagonist – Cribbins becomes something deeper. An exploration of resilience, endurance and the brutal strength required to face the monsters that live inside us.
Cribbins is a story about how we survive the things that try to destroy us from within.
Because Cribbins unfolds during the winter months, it feels right at home in my The Ghosts of Winter theme. And since January sits at the heart of this seasonal mood, I’m offering the book at a special price this week.
If you feel the wicked pull of Cribbins, consider this your invitation to step inside.
But don’t say I didn’t warn you – Ronnie Cribbins is seriously deranged.
(Free to read with Kindle Unlimited).
R. H. DIXON 