Universes

The universes that now sit under the Pure Hokum umbrella arrived organically, over years, and started connecting to each other before I fully understood what was happening. Characters from one world turned up in another. Institutions developed branch offices across continents and centuries. The Tillinghast family, who have been causing trouble in Pleasant Green for years, apparently have cousins in New York; Kennedy Fisher nearly met Aldrich Kemp once in Amsterdam; The Origin's Forsaken McTeague has helped out the Themis Group on several occasions...

Pleasant Green

The Pleasant Green Universe was where this all started. With The Lovecraft Investigations podcast we have built a large, devoted audience over four (and counting) award-winning seasons. Mythos, an audio fiction series, has extended the universe into more absurdist territory and has become a fan-favourite, helping to drive 2025's Kickstarter campaign to record levels for this medium. Those two shows are supported by several radio plays that have garnered more than their fair share of prizes.

One of those plays, Bad Memories, is now a movie screenplay which was featured on the 2025 Blacklist.

A large and enthusiastic community has grown around these endeavours, centred on the in-world website, which expands the universe through serialised prose and an extensive wiki called The Attic.

Thanks to the success of our first Kickstarter campaign, we will be releasing a new 5-part audio documentary on Crowley (co-written with Unexplained's Richard Maclean Smith) and a new Mythos adventure in 2026.

European Sinister

In September 1914, in the crypt of a church in a French village called Melusine, a ritual was conducted while the Battle of the Marne raged overhead. It partially succeeded. The village was erased from existence, absorbed into a tear in reality that left no trace in any map, census record, or living memory. What it was designed to summon did not fully arrive. But something did come through before the crack closed: not a creature, not a god, but an idea. A seed. It fed on the industrial slaughter of the Western Front and it grew...

"European Sinister" is the designation given by the Department of Works to all events, anomalies and organisations tracing their roots back to whatever emerged from the crack in reality during the Melusine ritual.

The organisations that fall under that designation have been operating throughout the twentieth century and continue today. De Kliek is a network of families and financial interests, based in Amsterdam, prosecuting a very long game. The Penzoldt Institute is a psychiatric facility with roots in the Carpathian Mountains and a continuation in London, whose research into primal fear has consequences for its patients that do not appear in any published paper. The Levesque Institute is a private archive on the Île Saint-Louis in Paris whose curator is better informed on these matters than almost anyone alive. Projekt 17 is a Soviet-era programme, launched in the 1950s and believed to have been shuttered during Glasnost, headquartered in Norilsk, conducting unspeakable experiments in pursuit of a new breed of weapon.

Not all of this history is recent:

The Shadow World, a feature film in development, is set in the 1960s, following a British government operative who finds that the Cold War has a stranger underside than can be officially acknowledged.
De Kliek, serialised for subscribers on the Pleasant Green site, follows the investigators Matthew Heawood and Kennedy Fisher into darker and more clandestine territory.
Nocturne, a feature screenplay in development, enters from a different angle: one young woman, one night in Paris, and something she cannot name.

Albany

The Albany Universe is anchored in contemporary New York. The monsters of occult history have adapted to the times; they no longer wait to pounce in gaslit alleyways, now they're in your laptop, on your phone, or sitting at the next table in your local coffee shop. Headquartered in the hidden archive rooms beneath the New York Public Library, The Albany Group is a secret group of ordinary people who defend the city against occult incursions. Their opponents are not just the things that go bump in the night, they are also the powerful New York industrial families who have harnessed these entities to consolidate their power.

Kaleidoscope

A contemporary spy-fi universe with a 60s flavour. Secret agents, international criminal masterminds, and more neurological gadgetry than you can shake a stick at. This is a world where action and high adventure collides messily with real life.

The longest-running project is the Aldrich Kemp series: three BBC Radio 4 audio dramas, now collected on Audible, following intelligence analyst Clara Page as she tries to get a handle on the eponymous international criminal mastermind, who is variously her partner, her adversary, her employer, and her most consistent source of near-death experiences.

Clandestino is a feature screenplay, currently in development. Belinda Drake is the best agent The Centre has ever had. The Basilisk is a neurological weapon that kills its carrier from the inside — and it has been encoded into her memory. Ambushed and hunted, Belinda has gone to ground in Europe, not knowing that she only has twenty-four hours before her brain turns to mush.

The novel Kaleidoscope, which forms the cornerstone of this universe, is being serialised, in part, on this site. You can read that here.

The Origin

There is another America. It predates European arrival, has its own society, its own hierarchy, and its own rules. The Origin is a secret organisation founded in 1620 by a Mayflower passenger called Mr Ely, who wasn't on the passenger manifest and who vanished into the wilderness as soon as the ship docked.

The Origin is the shadow government of America, operating as a safety net for those who can no longer live within mainstream American life: the victims, the outlaws, the misfits. Entry comes through a little red book called How To Disappear In America, delivered by a woman known as Raggedy Ann, which contains instructions specific and tailored to whoever holds it.

Follow those instructions and you will drop right off the grid and find yourself living in an America with very different rules.