When the Earth Remembers
Some places feel heavy before you even know their history. The silence of a deserted street. The rusting shell of a factory. A forest clearing where nothing grows. Whether it’s the exclusion zone around Chernobyl’s “Red Forest” or the abandoned fishing towns near Fukushima, these spaces carry a weight that goes beyond what the eye can see.
Radiation is an especially haunting reminder of this. Invisible, odourless, yet persistent, it lingers long after the moment of catastrophe. It does not howl or stalk, yet its presence is as chilling as any spectre. In fiction, it often plays the role of silent antagonist, embodying both human neglect and nature’s slow revenge. In Decay, that idea becomes the beating heart of the novel. Rather than a grand disaster, the story turns to something smaller but more insidious: an “orphan source”: radioactive material abandoned; left to seep into the soil.
The Silent Echo of Radiation
Radiation belongs to a rare category of horror antagonist that does not require a monstrous body. It does not growl, nor does it rise suddenly from the shadows. Instead, it lies in wait, invisible and persistent, eroding safety in silence. Fire crackles and storms announce themselves with thunder, but radiation passes quietly through soil and bone. That quietness provides its menace: a threat that resists both sight and sound.
In Decay, the danger takes shape through what experts call an “orphan source”, a term used for radioactive material that has slipped from official oversight. These sources include discarded medical isotopes, industrial gauges, or capsules of fuel misplaced in transit. Each belongs to the forgotten detritus of the nuclear age. Though rarely encountered, they haunt the imagination because they represent a harm both human-made and enduring.
History has offered several reminders of the silent devastation they carry. In 1987, residents of Goiânia in Brazil discovered fragments of a discarded radiotherapy device. The powder glowed blue in the dark, and children played with it as though it were a toy. The exposure left entire households stricken before officials understood the cause. 1 In 2013, armed men in Mexico hijacked a lorry and only later realised that the cargo held cobalt-60. The thieves dismantled the container, unleashing a source with levels of radioactivity high enough to kill. 2 Such events remain etched in public memory because they show how quickly ordinary life can become marked by radiation once it escapes control.
Decay weaves these histories into fiction. The orphan source in the novel acts less like industrial refuse and more like a folkloric relic, a buried object that hums quietly in the soil. Its corruption does not roar into being but builds through suggestion. Animals tremble. Photographs distort with static. Children develop fevers that resist explanation. The horror emerges not from spectacle, but from the slow realisation that the ground itself has turned against those who stand upon it.
Radiation within the novel becomes an echo of the past. It preserves memory in the way a haunting preserves grief, shaping lives without demanding recognition. Just as ghost stories warn us of unresolved wrongs, the orphan source in Decay insists that what has been abandoned still exerts influence.
The Land That Refuses to Forget
Landscapes hold memory. Old battlefields bloom with wildflowers where soldiers once fell. Industrial towns sit upon soil that still carries the imprint of smelters and smoke. Radiation adds another layer to this history, for it does not erode with the seasons. It sinks into earth and water, creating sites where the past continues to shape the present.
Sweden, the setting of Decay, has long been a place where forests command respect. Pines and birches stretch across valleys that remain largely untouched. Lakes lie silent beneath the mountains. Within the novel, these forests do more than provide scenery. They serve as an archive. The ground feels warm when it should lie frozen, birdsong falters, and an unnatural hush descends over paths where families once camped. The soil itself seems to whisper that something has gone wrong.
This idea of environmental memory has grounding in reality. The Red Forest near Chernobyl still contains radioactive particles from the explosion of 1986, and dead trees remain buried in trenches that continue to emit radiation. 3 In Japan, abandoned villages near Fukushima bear signs of a disaster that took place more than a decade ago, with houses intact but clocks and calendars fixed forever to March 2011. 4 Such landscapes testify to how land remembers far longer than people.
Scandinavian folklore often expresses the same truth through story. Tales describe the skogsrå, a spirit of the forest who watches over her domain. Those who fail to show respect may find themselves lost, their minds clouded, or their bodies drawn deeper into the trees. 5 Within Decay, radiation takes on this folkloric quality. It punishes neglect, not through sudden catastrophe, but by turning familiar places uncanny. Campsites grow hostile, waters ripple with a faint unnatural glow, and a quiet clearing becomes an ambush of memory.
Horror thrives in these spaces because the land itself becomes a participant in the story. Instead of serving as a backdrop, the forest acts as an agent. It does not forgive, and it does not fade. The world of Decay insists that to forget the harm done to a place is to walk unprepared into its lingering memory.
Family, Trauma, and Inheritance
Radiation does not remain confined to soil or water. It enters the body, altering cells, weakening organs, and shaping generations. In Decay, this process mirrors the ways trauma passes through families. Johan, Freya, and Lena do not simply encounter a contaminated landscape. They also inherit wounds that come from one another, each carrying scars of past decisions and unspoken grief.
Johan represents survival at a cost. He grew up in the shadow of an earlier exposure and struggles to balance care for his daughter with the exhaustion that marks his own body. Freya, who once shared her life with him, finds herself drawn back to the campsite where their relationship fractured. The reunion does not heal the distance between them. Instead, it repeats old cycles. Arguments return, suspicions harden, and the child becomes witness to tensions that seem older than she is.
This cycle reflects the way psychologists describe intergenerational trauma. Experiences of loss, neglect, or displacement shape parents in ways that often echo through their children. 6 Families touched by events such as Chernobyl or Fukushima sometimes speak of illness as an inheritance, carried in bodies but also in household routines. 7 The fear of contamination becomes as present as the contamination itself.
In the novel, Lena embodies this inheritance. She is young, yet already affected. Her fevers and sudden weariness suggest radiation’s mark, while her responses to conflict reveal the burden of her parents’ history. She does not inherit only the landscape’s contamination, but also the silences and fractures of the family that brought her there.
Radiation here becomes more than a scientific hazard. It functions as a metaphor for memory that clings across generations. Just as fallout persists in soil, unresolved grief and conflict remain within families. Horror emerges when these residues surface, refusing to dissolve with time. By linking physical exposure to emotional legacy, Decay presents a vision of inheritance where the past is never truly past.
Horror as Cultural Memory
Horror has always carried the weight of memory. Gothic novels in the nineteenth century revisited castles and ruins, places where the past intruded on the present. Twentieth-century horror often turned to science and technology, exploring the anxieties born from nuclear tests, chemical weapons, and environmental collapse. Each generation finds in horror the stories that remind it of what cannot be forgotten.
Decay belongs to this tradition while also reflecting the concerns of its own moment. Readers in the twenty-first century live with a heightened awareness of ecological crisis. Rising seas, intense storms, and debates about energy policy fill the news cycle. These concerns shape cultural imagination just as surely as ghost stories once reflected fears of the grave. Horror that draws on radiation and ecological contamination speaks directly to audiences already anxious about an uncertain future. 8
In this light, the orphan source in Decay acts as more than a plot device. It becomes a symbol of how human societies create residues that continue to shape life long after official narratives have moved on. Governments may close a file, but the land retains the scar. Families may try to move forward, but illness or silence reveals what remains unresolved. Horror steps in to give voice to these lingering presences.
Contemporary criticism has begun to describe this trend as eco-horror, a genre where the environment itself takes on an active role in frightening or punishing humanity. 9 Radiation, pollution, and climate change provide material that resonates because it belongs not only to the imagination but also to daily headlines. The settings of Decay feel plausible because they echo the landscapes of Chernobyl and Fukushima, where everyday life continues under the shadow of invisible danger.
The landscapes of Decay show that horror does not always arrive with spectacle. Sometimes it hides in the soil, in the silence of a forest, or in the body of a child who begins to tire too easily. Radiation in the novel is both real and symbolic, an unseen presence that demonstrates how the world records what people would rather set aside.
For readers who recognise that the past always finds a way to return, Decay offers both a chilling narrative and a reflection on the present. It is a story for anyone who has felt the weight of a place, the silence of history, or the anxiety of a future shaped by forgotten decisions.
Decay will be available 10th October worldwide.
