The Keeping

A dark fantasy series about the people who carry the dead

In the Keeping, the living can carry the dead, name and voice and self, in marks worn on the skin. The people who do it are keepers. Those who hunt them are Takers, and a soul a Taker finishes is gone for good.

What makes it dark

Losing the body is only the first death. Being forgotten is the second death, and it is the trade of the Takers, who eat a soul's memory until nothing is left of it. Each keeping in these books is a fight against that, and each fight costs the keeper something real: a memory, a year, a piece of the skin they have left.

The hero of the first trilogy is no warrior. He empties dead people's flats in Antwerp for a living, until the morning he finds a dead stranger's family inked across his own skin.

Who it is for

It is for readers who want grief with teeth. Using the magic always costs something. The dead are people, not props. And the hero has to decide, day after day, what kind of keeper he is going to be. If you liked The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue, Ninth House, A Darker Shade of Magic, The Ten Thousand Doors of January or The Atlas Six, start here.

Seven series, one world

The Borrowed Dead Antwerp · A Trilogy · Complete, all 3 out now A clearance man wakes one morning with a dead stranger's family on his skin, and the marks open onto other times. The Founding of the Aumbry The Bridge · A Novel of the Keeping · 9 November 2026 How the school was born. The founder carries his last dead and hands the craft on. The Aumbry Years The School Saga · 5 Books · From 9 December 2026 A school that teaches you to keep the dead without taking them over. Dark academia, told across five years, with one heir nobody thought to protect. The Nightcrosser Naples · A Trilogy · From 9 March 2027 A homicide detective with a quiet kind of magic, who crosses into the land of the dead to bring back the ones taken before their time. Occult noir, set in Naples. The Written Bones Prague · A Trilogy · From 9 June 2027 A Prague relic-keeper writes the dead into bone, and hunts the fallen of her own house, one bad night of grief from becoming what she hunts. Gothic occult thriller. The Gravesalt Road The Road · A Trilogy · From 9 September 2027 The far salt-flats. A wanderer so crowded with the dead he carries that he is barely a man keeps the souls no one else will, and his dog carries the one soul he could not bear to hold himself.

The Unconnected The Riviera · A Trilogy · In the works A supernatural thriller on the French Riviera where a grieving engineer hunts the keepers of the dead, and you always know, before he does, what his machines are setting loose.

In the Codex

Keepers A Keeper carries real dead in the marks on their skin, and lets them live alongside the living rather than consuming them. Takers A Taker consumes the memory of the dead for power. To them a Keeping is a full larder, and a good Keeper is the richest one they will find. The Second Death The first death is the body. The second is being forgotten, eaten name by name until a person is gone for good. It is what the Takers do, and what the marks are meant to prevent. The Three Rules of the Marks The whole reader-facing magic, cut to three lines: looking is free but loud, traveling costs a name off your skin, and nobody may take over a body.