London-based novelist DDL Smith, known for the Detective Dion series, announces the release of his anticipated novel, "Decay." Arriving October 10th, 2025, Decay is the first novel to be available in large book-chains directly from release.

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.

When I travelled to Östersund while preparing Decay, I wasn’t only looking at maps and weather patterns. I was listening. The forests in Jämtland and across the Västernorrland border carry a silence that is never just absence. It is a silence full of weight, a silence that presses. People there know it. They have always known it. And when they lacked the language of radiation or soil instability, they gave that silence form in story. I found myself drawn to those stories.