House of Wyrd by Maura McHugh: A Tarot-Infused Occult Horror That Walks the Path

Walk the path. Face the Devil. Find your mother.

Aly Wyrd, the “art-monster” single mother and magician of Maura McHugh’s extraordinary new novella, has vanished. Her daughter Pallas, named for the goddess who sprang fully formed from her father’s head, must navigate dream, memory, and arcane mystery to find her. The trail leads up Slieve Peist, an Irish mountain transformed into the Illumination Trail, a physical Tarot deck where each installation corresponds to a Major Arcana card. House of Wyrd is occult horror that reads like a fever dream, a mother-daughter drama, and a love letter to the weird all at once.

HOUSE OF WYRD | MAURA MCHUGH | ABSINTHE BOOKS | JUNE 2026

House of Wyrd by Maura McHugh: A Tarot-Infused Occult Horror That Walks the Path

Aly Wyrd, famous art provocateur and self-described magician, is missing on the eve of opening her visionary project, the Path of Illumination. Her daughter Pallas, Pallas Trismegistus Morrigan Aylward, because of course, has to find her.

That’s the setup. What Maura McHugh does with it is something else entirely.

House of Wyrd is a novella that operates on multiple levels. It’s a mother-daughter drama about the impossible weight of being the child of a genius. It’s an occult mystery about the cost of ambition and the debts we incur in our pursuit of transcendence. And it’s a physical journey up an Irish mountain that mirrors the Fool’s walk through the Tarot’s Major Arcana, from Zero to The World.

The atmosphere is the thing. McHugh builds dread through accumulation rather than shock. The prose is precise without being clinical, lyrical without tipping into purple. She trusts the reader to feel the wrongness in the air, the subtle static crackle of magic that shouldn’t quite work but does. The house itself, the House of Wyrd of the title, breathes with its own weird life, a Georgian manor in rural Kerry that has been painted, renovated, and haunted into something that feels like a character in its own right.

And then there’s the mountain. Slieve Peist, the fictional peak behind the house, has been transformed by Aly into the Illumination Trail. Each installation corresponds to a Major Arcana card. The Fool’s Egg, where you sit and imagine what you want to make real. The Magician’s theatre. The High Priestess’s temple. The Devil’s cave, with its chained hybrid creatures and booming laughter. Walking the trail is walking the Tarot, and McHugh renders each station with such vivid specificity that you can almost feel the wind on your face and the ache in your legs.

The writing is where this novella earns its keep. McHugh has an MA in Irish Gothic and an MA in Screenwriting, yes, she has two, and it shows in the architecture of the sentences. She shifts between registers with surgical precision. The present-tense scenes of Pallas walking the mountain are lean and urgent, stripped back to essentials. The flashbacks to Aly’s past in 1980s London and 1990s Kerry are richer, more layered, dense with sensory detail and the particular texture of memory.

There’s a scene where Aly curses Declan Devereaux on the steps of his own house, she’s seventeen, pregnant Maggie is beside her, and the curse lands like a physical blow. McHugh writes it with the force of a folk ballad, all raw power and righteous fury.

The dialogue crackles. Aly’s voice in particular is a triumph: caustic, brilliant, utterly convinced of her own rightness, and somehow still heartbreaking. When she tells Pallas “You are my creation, my most glorious conjuring,” you hear both the love and the possessiveness, the way she can’t separate her daughter from her art. Pallas, for her part, is the perfect foil—spiky, defensive, desperate for approval she won’t admit she wants. Their arguments feel lived-in, the product of decades of accumulated grievance.

Structurally, McHugh does something clever. The novella is short, just over a hundred pages, but it covers three decades and two countries. She achieves this through a kind of controlled fragmentation: memories surface as Pallas walks, triggered by each Tarot station. The present-tense journey provides the spine; the past provides the flesh. It’s a structure that could feel gimmicky in less capable hands, but McHugh makes it feel inevitable. Of course, you remember your mother’s greatest failure when you’re standing in front of The Devil. Of course, you recall the moment she cursed a man when you were at The Magician.

Beneath the occult trappings, this is a book about mothers and daughters. About the particular cruelty of being the child of someone who sees you as their greatest creation, and the particular loneliness of trying to become your own person in the shadow of that. Pallas has spent her adult life running from Aly’s influence, building a career as an astrological stock market analyst (Athena Star Analysis, because again, of course) and keeping her esoteric interests secret. She’s embarrassed to admit she loves the same things her mother loves. The book understands that particular shame with uncomfortable precision.

The real-world resonances are there if you want them. The 1980s London art scene, the 1990s Irish cultural awakening, the slow collapse of the Celtic Tiger’s promises, McHugh sketches these with a light touch, but they ground the story in something recognisable. Aly’s trajectory from outsider artist to establishment figure echoes the journey of many women artists who fought their way into a male-dominated world. The curse she lays on Declan Devereaux, “You will waste, your family will wither. Your memory will be erased”, is a wish for erasure of the patriarchal structures that tried to erase her.

What House of Wyrd confirms is that her talents are not limited to short forms. She can sustain atmosphere and tension across a longer narrative without losing the precision that makes her shorter work so effective.

Where does this sit in the current horror landscape? It’s occult horror in the tradition of writers like Lisa Tuttle and Alison Littlewood, both of whom blurbed it, which tells you something. It shares DNA with the folk horror revival, particularly the strand that examines the intersection of land, belief, and female power. But it’s also doing something more specific: it’s using the Tarot as both structure and sacrament, a narrative engine that generates meaning as much as plot. The closest comparison might be the work of Rachel Pollack, who wrote Tarot-infused fiction that treated the cards as living symbols rather than mere props. McHugh’s novella feels like a natural heir to that tradition.

The Tarot is not decorative here. It’s the skeleton of the book. Each Major Arcana card that Pallas encounters on the mountain teaches her something, about her mother, about herself, about the nature of magic and the cost of ambition. The Devil forces her to confront her worst self. The Tower shows her the ruin of vain ambition. The World offers a kind of exhausted transcendence. McHugh knows her Tarot; she’s been studying it since she was nineteen. That knowledge infuses every page, but she never lets it become homework. The symbolism is there if you want it, but the story works even if you don’t know your Cups from your Wands.

The ending earns its emotional weight. I won’t spoil it, but I’ll say this: the climactic confrontation on the mountain involves a goddess, a betrayal, and a mother-daughter reckoning that lands like a punch to the chest. McHugh doesn’t flinch from the consequences of her characters’ choices. She doesn’t offer easy forgiveness. What she offers is something rarer: the possibility of understanding, however imperfect.

House of Wyrd is a novella that does what the best horror does: it makes the strange feel familiar and the familiar feel strange. It walks the line between magic and psychology, between the supernatural and the all-too-human, and it never loses its footing. McHugh has written something that feels both timeless and entirely of this moment—a book about the cost of ambition, the weight of inheritance, and the long, winding road back to the people we love.

The mountain is waiting. Walk it.

House of Wyrd by Maura McHugh

A NOVELLA by Maura McHugh
CATEGORY  Mystery & Magic
PUBLICATION DATE  June 2026
COVER ART  Lisa Laughy
PAGES  102

EDITION
Signed Hardcover, limited to 200 numbered copies signed by the author — ISBN 978-1-80394-573-6  [£20]

ABOUT THE BOOK

“Poignant, wry and compelling. McHugh’s tale of family crises and arcane mysteries brings the magic.” 

—M.R. Carey (Outlaw Planet, Infinity Gate)

“A colourful, mysterious Tarot-infused occult adventure, so vividly written that reading it was like having a weird and wonderful dream. It features two great characters: Aly, the “art-monster” single mother and her conflicted adult daughter Pallas—and now I wish for more stories about them.”

—Lisa Tuttle (The Mysteries, A Nest of Nightmares) 

“Beautifully realised characters, a dark and magical quest at its heart and prose that’s a sheer delight—Maura McHugh’s latest novella is a joy to read.”

—Alison Littlewood (Path of Needles, The Crow Garden)

Aly Wyrd, famous art provocateur and magician, is missing on the eve of the opening of her visionary project, the Path of Illumination. 
It falls to her estranged daughter, Pallas Trismegistus Morrigan Aylward, to navigate through dream, memory and arcane mystery to revisit her history 
with her mother in ’80s London and ’90s Ireland until Pallas catches up with present-day revelation by walking the road to enlightenment designed by her mother.   

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