Steal Me by Helen Grant: A Folk Horror Novella That Reads You Back

A cursed bookshop sells you the worst thing you secretly want.

Helen Grant’s Steal Me is a folk horror novella that arrives looking like a quiet story about a small Scottish town, then quietly takes you apart. A new bookshop called Legends opens its doors, and every customer walks out with a book that knows their darkest want. This is fairy-tale horror with real teeth, a cursed bookshop story rooted in old Grimm folklore and dressed in contemporary Scottish Gothic. If you love the folk horror revival, or any tale about desire and temptation curdling into dread, Grant has written something lean, clever, and hard to shake. Here is my full review.

Steal Me | Helen Grant | Absinthe Books (PS Publishing) | 2026 |

The milk in Rowan’s fridge curdles overnight, well before its use-by date, and the fridge is working fine. A small wrong thing. That is how Helen Grant opens Steal Me, on sour milk and a sharp nip in the spring air, and she knows exactly what she is doing. By the time you notice the dread, it has already moved in and put its feet up.

Steal Me is a folk horror novella with fairy-tale bones, and it works on you the slow way. No big shocks up front. Just a new shop, a curious crowd, and a quiet feeling that something has shifted in a small Scottish town.

The shop is called Legends. Gold lettering on the storefront, the kind of place that draws a little cluster of gawpers because nothing else happens in a town this size. Rowan goes in, the way you do. She picks up a book. The book has her number.

STEAL ME, it says. You know you want to.

Here is where Grant earns her keep. The horror in this book is not a thing in the dark. It is a thing that knows you. Rowan used to shoplift, a habit she has worked hard to leave behind, and the book in her hands knows that. It calls her a thief, the brutal word she hates. It quotes her late father back at her about wasting God-given talents. It reminds her of the bag of jelly babies she swiped as a kid for the thrill alone. How does a book know all that? It just does, and that is the point.

Reading this feels like being talked into something you swore off. The dread arrives the way damp arrives in an old house, from the inside out, long before you see the stain.

Grant builds tension by keeping the surface ordinary. The town carries on. People shop, gossip, complain about bins and parking. Then small cracks appear. Folk who have been to Legends and bought a book start acting out of character. The wrongness spreads sideways, neighbour to neighbour. You feel it gather before anyone in the story names it.

What I love is the patience of it. Grant trusts the quiet. She lets you sit with Rowan in her kitchen, lets you walk the cut-through and the old churchyard, lets the High Street feel real and grey and a bit tired. So when the second-hand smell of the shop reaches you, and the two near-identical old ladies behind the counter watch you over their reading glasses, your skin already knows.

This is short, sharp work. A novella that does not waste a page. The pacing tightens like a wire you did not realise was around your wrist until it pulls.

Her sentences are clean and unfussy, which means the strange ones land with a weight. She mostly stays close behind Rowan, a tight third person that lets us feel the pull of the book without ever quite trusting Rowan to resist it.

Then she steps away. There are chapters that follow other townsfolk, and these are the engine room of the dread. We watch Yasmina, an old classmate of Rowan’s, sink into a leather armchair in the shop and open a book in which she is the heroine, a princess of surpassing beauty and intelligence in a world of djinn and scheming viziers. We see the trick work on someone else, in real time. That repetition is far scarier than any one scare. The shop does this to everyone. It has a book for each of us.

The dialogue has a dry Scottish snap to it. Rowan swears under her breath. People talk like people. Grant has an ear for the way small-town malice hides inside small talk, the two older women muttering that the new shop will be shut in a month, the tone larded with satisfaction at the thought.

Best of all is the embedded tale. Midway through, a character reads aloud the origin of the shop, an old folk story set in the German city of Würzburg, where two sisters once set up a shop full of marvellous books that cursed everyone who bought them. Grant shifts register completely here, into the cadence of a told fable, and it is a lovely piece of construction. A story inside the story, explaining the story, and somehow making it worse.

Reading her prose is like watching a careful hand fold a paper bird; every crease looks simple, and then the thing stands up and turns its head.

Underneath the chills, this is a book about wanting.

The genius of Legends is that it does not sell horror. It sells desire. Each book is a perfect mirror of the thing a person most wants and most tries to hide. Yasmina wants to be the centre of an adventure. Rowan wants the old thrill of taking what is not hers. The shop simply gives people permission to be the worst version of what they already are, then charges them everything.

That makes Steal Me a clever study of temptation and the stories we tell to excuse ourselves. Rowan insists that shoplifting is not really stealing, that giving the loot away somehow cleans it. The book calls her bluff. It knows the thrill was always the point. Anyone who has talked themselves into a bad habit, one quiet excuse at a time, will feel the cold accuracy of that.

You can read it as a story about addiction and relapse, about how the thing that ruins you is always tailor-made to your particular weakness. You can read it as a sharp little fable about consumer want, the shop that promises the version of yourself you would buy if you could. The fairy-tale frame ties it back to the old Grimm warnings, the ones that always knew wanting was dangerous and that the prettiest offer hides the sharpest hook.

The German folklore is not set dressing. The shop, we learn, runs on a talisman, a soul in the form of a book, and the only way to be free is to find and destroy it. That quest is brutal in its logic. To search the shelves you must open the books, and to open a book is to be taken. The trap and the cure live in the same place.

Grant has been circling these ideas for a while, and it shows.

Jump Cut asked what we will pay to possess the thing we crave. Steal Me asks the same question and strips it to the bone, swapping a lost film for a cursed book and a feature-length plot for the clean compression of a novella. Grant has moved from the slow burn of the full Gothic novel to something tighter and more fable-like, and the discipline suits her. She has always written about Scotland and about Germany, about houses and history and the pull of the past. Here she folds all of it into one small shop and one small word on a page.

The obvious cousin is Stephen King’s Needful Things, another tale of a shop that arrives in a quiet town and sells each resident the secret thing they crave, with the bill coming due in blood. Grant is playing in that lineage, the cursed-object, corrupted-community tradition. But she is doing something leaner and older with it. Where King sprawls, she compresses. Where his shop trades in objects, hers trades in stories. That makes the curse feel personal in a way that gets under the skin.

For the fairy-tale register, think of Angela Carter’s reworked tales, the sense that old stories carry teeth. For the slow rural unease, think of Andrew Michael Hurley’s Starve Acre and The Loney, that patient folk horror where the landscape and the neighbours do the damage. For the intimate domestic dread, Catriona Ward is a fair neighbour. Grant earns her place on that shelf and then does the one thing none of them quite do. She makes the cursed object a book, and hands it to you to hold.

That is where Steal Me points the genre. Horror keeps getting more intimate, more interested in the monster that wears your own wants like a mask. Grant has found a near-perfect object for that idea, because you are reading a book about a book that reads you back.

Grant wrote a story about a book that teaches you what you want and turns it into a leash, then puts it in your hands. Mine sits on the shelf now, and I keep glancing over to make sure it is staying put.

Steal Me by Helen Grant

A NOVELLA by Helen Grant
CATEGORY  Dark Speculative Fiction
PUBLICATION DATE  June 2026
COVER ART  John Coulthart
PAGES  101

EDITION
Signed Hardcover, limited to 200 numbered copies signed by the author — ISBN 978-1-80394-575-0  [£20]

ABOUT THE BOOK

“Transplants the atmosphere of a Grimm fairy tale to a small town in Scotland, simultaneously evoking the antiquarian terrors of M. R. James and the golden era of dark fantasy.”

—Maria J Pérez Cuervo, founder/editor of HELLEBORE.

“Helen Grant takes us on a chilling journey into the darkest of fairy tale origins against the backdrop of a modern-day Scottish village. The finely-drawn portraits of the locals and the mounting unease kept me turning pages—I finished it in a single sitting!”

—Lynda E. Rucker (Now It’s Dark, You’ll Know When You Get There)

Rowan Byrne hasn’t stolen anything for ages—not since she started to straighten her life out after a personal tragedy. But the volume she’s just picked up in the new bookshop in town seems to want her to steal it. The text is very persuasive. There’s a book for everyone in Legends—a book that will encourage their worst impulses. Steal. Fear. Burn. Kill. It’s not long before Rowan’s small town, isolated from the outside world, is descending into mayhem. Assailed by her own demons, Rowan could try to cut and run. Or she could make a stand, and try to save the community she loves . . .

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