Book I of a Gothic Saga · Complete Manuscript

The Thirteen
Chimes

Edinburgh · December 1869

A murder in a locked room in Victorian Edinburgh, where documented European folklore begins to fracture the logic of the modern world.

Victorian Gothic Folk Horror Literary Supernatural Book I Complete
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The Thirteen Chimes — Cover
mosta@foxtale.es
The story
«Never tear down a fence until you know why it was put there». — After G. K. Chesterton

A city where the old rules return.

Edinburgh, 23 December 1869. Inspector Malcolm Fraser is called to a corpse found in a room locked from the inside: three wounds that bled after death, an expression of absolute terror, and no humanly possible way out.

The case brings together four figures: Fraser, a sceptical inspector; Lyle MacLintock, forensic physician and former comrade-in-arms; Doves, a young constable; and Eleanor Withmore, a medium active in Edinburgh's spiritualist circles.

Each understands a different part of the case. None understands enough.

As the deaths spread, the investigation abandons criminal logic and enters a forgotten system of European belief: the Wild Hunt, soul-doubles, forbidden texts, and rules the modern city no longer knows how to follow.

The differentiating factor
This is not fantasy with decorative folklore

The supernatural is fiction.
Its logic is not.

It is built from within the beliefs themselves — as those who practised them lived them, feared them, and defended them in real trials.

I

Every supernatural mechanic is grounded in historical folklore, court records, spiritualist practices, or ancient models of the soul.

II

What the reader takes for fantasy was, at the time, evidence: sworn under oath, debated by theologians, recorded by judges.

III

The difference is not whether the impossible appears. The difference is whether the impossible carries the real weight of human belief.

The author
Fernando
Mostacero Serra
Publishes as F. Mosta · Barcelona / Auckland, NZ

Not a novelist who has read about witchcraft.
Someone who spent years explaining it to the public.

I The Haunted Oak · Barcelona

Former owner of The Haunted Oak, a cultural space in the medieval heart of Barcelona dedicated to the public study of magical thought and European folklore. Finalist for Best Shop in El Born 2023.

II Researcher and speaker

Talks, lectures, and podcast interviews on witchcraft, ecstatic journeys, domestic spirits, and the survival of pre-modern belief systems in Europe.

III Why this matters for the editor

The research behind the novel does not begin in a library. It begins in years of public work with the material: explaining it, debating it, defending its internal logic before a real audience.

Fernando Mostacero Serra is a storyteller and researcher of European magical folklore. Spanish, currently living in New Zealand.

His background is unusual and directly relevant to this book: he is not someone who researched it in order to write it. He is someone who spent years studying, teaching, and publicly debating the same belief system that drives the novel — witchcraft, ecstatism, the Wild Hunt, soul-doubles — before a single page existed.

The Thirteen Chimes is the result of that work: a novel with first-hand authority over its material, not its genre.

The saga treats folklore not as decoration, but as an ancient human technology for explaining fear, death, community, ritual, and the invisible. — F. Mosta

What the reader takes for fantasy,
others swore to under oath.

How the research appears in the text

The Wild Hunt that moves through Victorian Edinburgh is not treated as a fantasy trope, but as a pan-European complex of beliefs: the Wilde Jagd, the Norse Åsgårdsrei, the Welsh Cŵn Annwn. Its logic includes the testimony of Thiess of Kaltenbrun at the 1692 Livonian werewolf trials.

The spiritualist sessions are built from the language and rituals of the Victorian medium: private salons, public demonstrations, grief and spiritualist theatre. This is not a magic system. It is a collision between belief, evidence, and terror.

For editors, agents and translators

Book I is complete.
The universe is already mapped.

Status

Complete manuscript · 135,695 words · Spanish. Book I is conceived as a self-contained novel that opens a larger architecture of four volumes.

Genre positioning

Historical Gothic / Folk Horror / Literary Supernatural. Mystery structure with Victorian noir texture and a supernatural logic drawn from historical belief.

Languages and rights

Original manuscript in Spanish, available in full. Open to representation, translation, and publication in other languages.

Series potential

Book I first. The complete saga is mapped across four eras, but the immediate conversation centres on this first finished novel.

The novel's visual world

A novel with its own graphic universe

The illustrations were developed in parallel with the writing, as visual research and atmosphere studies.

AI-generated images, curated and art-directed by the author · F. Mosta
The complete architecture

A finished novel.
A larger structure behind it.

I
Edinburgh · 1869
The Thirteen Chimes

Victorian Gothic mystery. A detective, a medium, the Wild Hunt, and a book that should have remained sealed.

Complete · 135,695 words · Spanish
II
Algeciras → Catalonia · 1344
The Plague of the Three Laws

The Iberian medieval volume. The Black Death as a cosmological fracture. A werewolf of God, a hunted child, and a scribe who understands more than he dares to say.

In progress
III
Prehistory · Roman Gaul · 2nd century AD
The Origin

The beginning of human symbolic thought, the first invisible companions, and the earliest fracture between body, soul, and history.

IV
Barcelona → Auckland · Today
The Author as Fiction

The old structures break in the present. The author enters the story and must answer for the system he has unveiled.

Comparable territory
Susanna Clarke Alan Garner Mariana Enriquez Carlos Ruiz Zafón Sarah Waters Iain Pears
Rights and representation

Complete manuscript.
Ready to read.

Direct download
Sample of The Thirteen Chimes
PDF in Spanish · First chapters
Download sample ↓

Seeking

  • Literary agent: representation for the first complete novel.
  • Literary translator: Spanish into other languages (especially English).
  • Publisher: historical gothic / folk horror / literary supernatural.
Write to Fernando mosta@foxtale.es
Auckland Writers Festival 2026 · 12–17 May · Aotea Centre, Auckland NZ