TL;DR: A climate-anxious moorland novella where turbines whine like banshees and the past won’t stay buried. Clements fuses cli-fi unease with bog-body folklore and a very human scar that never healed, and the result lands, clean and mean, for readers who want their horror to smell like peat smoke and bad decisions.

Katherine Clements is already known for historical chillers and moor-wrung atmospheres, and Turbine 34 reads like a tight, contemporary cousin to The Coffin Path: fewer candles, more carbon, same bleak romance with the land. The Northern Weird Project frame suits her. You can feel a writer in home terrain, both literal and thematic, and you get that hit of location-as-inevitable-fate that her work does so well.

A middle-aged environmental scientist returns to the Yorkshire moors to evaluate the impact of a vast wind farm. She plants her tent by Turbine 34, a skeletal giant that hums like a headache and keeps whispering at night. She wants data and distance, but what she finds are absence where birdsong should be, a renovated farmhouse that used to anchor her memories, a boy and dog that act wrong, and the pull of the bog itself. The mission is science, the stakes are flood and failure, and the texture is gritstone, heat, infrasound, and a chorus that might be wolves or might be her nerves. The turbine shrieks, the valley siren wails, and the peat remembers what people forget.

Clements braids three horrors into one rope: ecological collapse, a community economically bled white, and a personal history that curdled into a secret grave. The book’s best set pieces work because they are observed like field notes and felt like confession. You get the turbine’s industrial music up close, the scar of aggregate and hardcore under your knees, the hush where curlews should be. You also get uncanny beats that click only later, like the keeper’s “dog whistle” she thinks she hears, then remembers humans can’t. Clements lets that detail sit in your teeth until it aches.

The novella is patient and tactile. The prose keeps a steady gait, sentence by sentence, like someone walking tussock to tussock, testing every step. Clements loves sensory specifics, and she lays them in like lichen: heat shimmer, diesel tang, peat stink, the turbine’s rhythm that resets the narrator’s breath. Structure is modular, “Day” and “Night” movements that escalate the uncanny without cheap jumps. When the writing wants to soar, it does, but the book mostly trusts clear sightlines and clean description. Even the flashbacks are cut like thin slices of muscle, giving you just enough blood to taste what went wrong without drowning the present plot.

Themes arrive slow, then stamp the heather flat. This is a story about what landscapes store. Peat stores carbon, yes, but it also stores culture, bodies, and the parts of us we refuse to name. The wind farm is not a cartoon villain. It is an intrusion that tries to fix one crisis while worsening another, which is exactly the messy human way. The narrator’s old entanglement with a charismatic teacher brews beneath everything, and the bog becomes both archive and avenger. When the weather finally breaks and the moor slides, Turbine 34 goes down like a toppled idol and the book reveals its cruel mercy: reunion, not rescue. The last images are intimate, earthy, and chilling, a surrender that reads like coming home.

Turbine 34 sits right in the pocket of modern British eco-gothic, shoulder to shoulder with the best moorland hauntings, but pointed at 2030s heatwaves and flood sirens. The Northern Weird brief promises uncanny Norths; Clements gives you a North where the uncanny is simply what you get when you pile unresolved history under urgent fixes and hope the weather behaves. The turbine isn’t the monster. It is a tuning fork that makes the old monster sing.

The prose is flint, the atmosphere is thick enough to chew, the ending clicks like a trap, and the book has that distinctiveness test that matters most: I kept hearing the blades after I was done. Recommended often, especially for readers who like their cli-fi haunted and their hauntings muddy.

Turbine 34 by Katherine Clements,
published November 6, 2025 by Wild Hunt.