The Milkman of St. Gaff's

The Milkman of St. Gaff's is a serialized fantasy-horror story in the Lovecraftian mould, set on an island where the figure most worth fearing is the milkman. The premise is played straight. The milkmen of St. Gaff's run a station, answer to a boss and gather intelligence, some people simply disappear without a trace, and the townspeople can only guess at the darker purpose behind the deliveries. After a catastrophe, the boss is transferred away and command of the station passes to Beaver, a large, doltish milkman who proves even more ruthless than his predecessor. The recent episodes belong to a story called 'Once out of Nature', released in numbered chapters, which braids several lives together. Naomi is one strand. She reads a huge old medical book by oil lamp while her father, Travis, works on a boat called the Bonnie May with a half-empty whiskey bottle close by. At church, beneath arches made of glowing green rib bones, she quizzes herself on the anatomical names for each part while a portly preacher named Father Whelan gives his sermon, then recognises a man in military uniform she has not seen in over a year. In 'Once out of Nature, Chapter One', she spots a two-masted ship under black sails through a spyglass and keeps watch on a hill until a blood-red sunrise. Later she wakes before dawn, calls for her father and gets no answer. The narration repeats a single line, that she is alone, until it stops reading as a sentence and starts landing like a pulse. Martin's strand is a war story that curdles. He wakes in a muddy trench with a rat gnawing his boot to find his unit has fallen back without him, and he also runs from a howling creature that moves with unnatural speed. Elsewhere on the field, a prisoner called H stands with a line of captives in blue uniforms on a riverbank, facing soldiers in grey. In 'Once out of Nature, Chapter Four', Martin and H share a basement and then a hayloft, two men from opposite sides of the line. With them is Milford, a milkman with theories: modern war, he says, comes down to factories and moving supplies, rather like two milk stations competing over who can get organised best. The joke carries a chill. When soldiers step out of the trees and Martin asks whether he is really a milkman, Milford answers that milkmen are everywhere. In 'Once out of Nature, Chapter Five', a man takes Naomi in even though he fears the milkmen will find out, and then a second, more insistent knock comes at the door. The writing is full of small sensory details, from a percolator nearly slammed onto a stove to the hush that evening brought to Martin's childhood games in a country village. The dread comes from institutions as much as monsters: a station, a chain of command, a delivery route that doubles as surveillance.