A Novel
Where the signal fails,
something else begins to speak.
Miles Chapman is a man in his early fifties — his marriage ended, an addiction concealed, his reputation quietly diminished. He rents a stone cottage deep in the Cairngorms National Park, chosen for its deliberate disconnection. No WiFi. No cellular signal. No way for the world to reach him, or for him to reach back.
What he finds is not silence but a different kind of noise. In a storage cupboard, a shortwave radio. On the shortwave radio, frequencies he cannot account for: a mechanical voice reading sequences of numbers, transmissions that stop and start without pattern or explanation. Numbers stations — Cold War relics, broadcasting still, to no one. Or so the official position goes.
The obsession takes hold gradually, then entirely. Miles begins to log the broadcasts: times, frequencies, patterns. And then the patterns begin to map onto his own life — dates that mean something, coordinates that lead somewhere, phrases that know things they should not know. Meanwhile, the cottage's caretaker, Maddy Winters, appears at moments that feel too coincidental, asks questions that seem too pointed.
Reception is a novel about the stories we tell ourselves in isolation — and the dangerous moment when the story starts to tell us.
For readers of Paul Tremblay, Jon McGregor, and Adam Nevill
Britain's largest national park — 4,528 square kilometres of ancient granite plateau, Caledonian pine forest, and heather moorland. A landscape shaped by glaciers and largely unchanged since. In winter and storm, it demands a different quality of attention from the mind.
Shortwave broadcasts detected since the First World War. A mechanical voice. A sequence of numbers. The transmissions stop and start without warning, on frequencies that shift, at times that follow no obvious pattern. Intelligence agencies neither confirm nor deny. The broadcasts continue.
A band from Salford, formed in 1976. Ian Curtis, Bernard Sumner, Peter Hook, Stephen Morris. Two albums: Unknown Pleasures, Closer. Music that mapped interior states which had no other language. Curtis died in May 1980. In certain rooms, in certain conditions of isolation, the records still speak.
A genre defined by landscape, isolation, and the slow recognition that the rational world has edges. In folk horror's tradition, the remote and the rural are never simply backdrop — they are active, participant, and ancient in ways that the mind in crisis cannot safely navigate.
The drive from Aviemore took longer than the listing had suggested. The road narrowed as it climbed, birch and Scots pine pressing in until the sky became a grey strip overhead, and Miles Chapman found himself hunching forward over the wheel as though that would help him see further into the failing light.
He almost missed the turn. A gap in the trees, a track of compressed gravel that curved away into darkness, a wooden sign so weathered he could only make out the word he had already expected: Reception. It had seemed an apt name when he'd booked it — a small, useful joke about disconnection. Now, arriving with his phone dead and the silence absolute, it seemed like something else entirely.
The cottage emerged from the trees. Walls of grey granite, a low roof, two small windows that looked back at him without expression. The kind of building that had absorbed a century of Cairngorm rain and simply continued. Maddy Winters stood by the door as she'd said she would be — arms folded, watching his car come up the track without moving or waving, her expression unreadable in the dusk.
He cut the engine. The silence was immediate and complete.
Continue reading when the novel is published...
"A novel that gets under your skin like Cairngorm cold. Miles Chapman's unravelling is rendered with such precision that you begin to doubt your own perceptions alongside his."
"Reception manages to be both a forensically observed portrait of addiction and a genuinely terrifying piece of folk horror. A rare and remarkable combination."
"The Cairngorms have never felt more alive — or more threatening. Perry's debut announces a major new voice in British dark fiction."
TRANSMISSION — 6.634 MHz — 03:17 UTC
"He told himself it was coincidence.
The numbers disagreed."
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