L. C. O’Briain — The Sacred King Cycle

The Book

Dr. Cian Kennedy, a Celtic Studies scholar at Trinity College Dublin, was taken from Dún Sídhe in the night at fifteen and never told why.

What did he do that was so awful he was taken from the only girl who ever held his heart and exiled to a silence that has lasted fifteen years?

In Galway, at his grandfather’s solicitor’s office, Cian is handed a letter and a key.

Come to Dún Sídhe. See what I left for you there. Forgive me if you can.

The estate on the Connemara coast hasn’t changed. In a library full of memories he finds a bridle in a locked drawer worked in cold iron. Three black hairs woven through the Celtic knots.

Cian Kennedy is the fifteenth generation. The Hunt is coming. The cost of leaving was never exile. It was delay.

Every generation, the Hunt rides. Every generation, someone dies.

Niamh

Dr. Cian Kennedy

The Trilogy

Samhain. Imbolc. Beltane.
The binding holds.

Samhain

He eats.

Imbolc

He crosses.

Beltane

He burns.

About the Author

L. C. O’Briain is a writer and cover designer working at the intersection of literary fiction, folk horror, and Celtic mythology. The Blood Feast is the first novel of The Sacred King Cycle, a trilogy structured on three Celtic fire festivals: Samhain, Imbolc, and Beltane.

The work draws on fifteen centuries of Irish mythological tradition and treats that tradition with the weight it demands. Gothic in sensibility. Unsparing in its moral architecture. Irish in its bones.

Comparable to Tana French’s Dublin Murder Squad series and Andrew Michael Hurley’s The Loney—the psychological interiority of literary crime fiction fused with folk horror’s slow dread.

Samhain. Imbolc. Beltane.The binding holds.

Samhain. Imbolc. Beltane.
The binding holds.