Overview

Christmas night, 1739. Austrian drums echoed cold across the Kempen. Twelve-year-old Lijsken Dreessen stood beneath the gallows and watched her brother die. The crowd went home to warm hearths. The priests turned their backs. The snow fell pitiless on the swaying bodies. She had nothing left but cold, hunger, and a rage too fierce for her small body. When the night offered a way to strike back-at everyone who wronged her kin-the desperate child took it. Some debts are paid in fire. Inspired by the real 18th-century legend of the Bokkenrijders-the ""goat riders"" whose night raids and brutal trials haunted the Low Countries-this dark historical fantasy weaves supernatural horror into the world of Austrian occupation, revolutionary upheaval, and the harsh realities of life in the Kempen. Over five decades of frozen winters, Lijsken wrestles with the mounting cost of retribution: every act of vengeance demands more than she can spare, every night of reckoning leaves a deeper mark, and the ancient power that answered her rage is patient, watchful, and never sated. Told in prose that feels like peat smoke and old campfire tales-rich with authentic Flemish folklore, the bite of real injustice, and the raw grief of the powerless-Children of the Billy-Goat Star is a haunting exploration of loss, fury, and the bargains struck when the world offers a child nothing but cold. Did it really happen like this, or is it only legend? On the Galgenberg, some questions have no answer. They say the devil always starts with a child. This is the legend of the child who made the world remember her. Perfect for readers of Susanna Clarke's atmospheric gothic, Silvia Moreno-Garcia's folk-horror, or anyone drawn to dark historical fantasy where vengeance rides on cloven hooves and the night itself has teeth.

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