A feral retelling of Irish myth where survival requires carrying the dead into the future
D. Firth Griffith’s The Way of Salmon Moon is the third book in the Rimwalker series, and it reads a bit like a nightmarish creation story.
A retelling of the Irish myth An Bradán Feasa (Salmon of Knowledge) through Paleolithic literary horror, this novel follows Cairbre, a man carrying the last of his people’s stories through a devastated world. He’s hunted by the upélos, those-who-take-too-much, invaders whose violence is simultaneously physical, spiritual, and ecological. Rykati, the old mare who travels with him, is the book’s fiercest expression of kinship, carrying Cairbre across the Rim of the World into a landscape where rivers duel, spirits move like wolves, and legends are at least as dangerous as any weapon.
Structurally and narratively, this is a nontraditional horror novel. It reads like ritual instructions, a haunted chase, and an elegy woven together. If you’re looking for neat scares and clean chapter-by-chapter momentum, you won’t find it here. What you will find is something stranger. The plot has standard horror elements: violence, pursuit, transformation, and revelation, but the deeper story is about whether memory can survive when nearly everything else has been destroyed.
The atmosphere, the land itself, is a corporeal character in Griffith’s hands. Snow presses against the body. Rivers have will. The Moon and Sun aren’t just objects in the sky but presences with names, moods, and individual obligations. The dead don’t vanish, and animals aren’t some-kind of symbols waiting for humans to interpret them. They’re kin. They’re witnesses, teachers, threats, and sometimes all of those at once.
In part because of the depth of the atmosphere, the worldbuilding here is dense, but it’s the reason the book works. The Paleolithic setting isn’t a prop. It feels like a full cosmology, one where weather, hunger, language, ceremony, blood, and animal bodies all belong to the same biosphere. Griffith requires the reader to enter that worldview instead of simply watching it from the outside.
The more successful elements of horror exist in the way the author merges bodily harm and spiritual damage. The upélos are fearsome because they don’t just kill a person. They take, and they take too much, threatening stories, kinship, place, and ancient pacts between beings. Their appetite becomes a kind of world-ending force. Griffith treats the body as holy and horrible at once: meat, memory, wound, appetite, and doorway. There’s plenty of blood, rot, hunger, and flesh. But the violence usually has purpose. It isn’t just gore for gore’s sake. It’s there because this is a novel obsessed with what bodies carry, what they lose, and what they become.
The language is the main event, and it’ll also be the dividing line for readers. Griffith writes in a high, chanting, mythic register full of repetition, Proto-Celtic terms, footnotes, and layered naming. Sometimes the prose feels less like narration and more like someone ranting beside a fire while the world is ending. Early in the book, Cairbre is told, “The great gift is colour,” and that line becomes one of the prose’s skeleton keys. Light, color, blood, story, and life are all forms of exchange. To live well is to reciprocate. To become monstrous is to hold too much.
An easy favorite of the book is Rykati, the old mare. The relationship between Cairbre and the mare gives the novel a tangible emotional center and keeps it from becoming only a storm of myth and blood. Rykati isn’t a sweet animal sidekick. She shelters Cairbre, challenges him, corrects him, and refuses to let him mistake control for kinship. Griffith’s knowledge of horses shows in the physical details: breath, weight, ears, mane, heat, ribs, the way bodies speak before language does. In one of the loveliest passages, Cairbre notices that “Her mane holds the expression of her being,” and that’s exactly the kind of sentence that shows how seriously this book takes animal presence. Rykati isn’t decorative. She’s a force.
The novel is also deeply interested in transformation. That’s where an Ovid comparison makes sense, though this is a much muddier, bloodier, more guttural kind of metamorphosis. Shape-changing here doesn’t feel like a trick. It feels like consequence. Bodies are unpredictable. Names are unstable. Even identity isn’t fixed in the way Cairbre wants it to be. The book keeps asking what it means to survive by becoming something other than what you were.
Where the book may lose some readers is its density. The language is, indeed, the star, but alongside footnotes, repeated images, ceremonial pacing, and invented or reconstructed language they do slow the narrative. Some chapters hold nearly every sentence at full intensity, and that can make the action feel buried under the prose. A little more variation in pressure could make some of the horror land harder. Readers looking for a fast, plot-forward horror novel may feel stuck in the snow with Cairbre longer than they want to be.
For fans though, that challenge is also part of the book’s identity. The Way of Salmon Moon isn’t trying to be a beach read. It’s immersive and alive with ceremony. Griffith commits completely to the world he’s made, and that commitment gives the novel its force.
Readers who like Stephen Graham Jones’s mythic violence, Cormac McCarthy’s brutal lyricism, or Clive Barker’s flesh-and-spirit horror will find clear points of connection here. I’d also recommend it to readers of literary eco-horror, experimental fantasy, and mythic fiction that treats animals and landscapes as beings instead of props.
The Way of Salmon Moon is strange, violent, devotional, and uncompromising—a story about the terrifying work of becoming something new.
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