Layers Upon Layers Upon Layers: Review of Scott Lambridis’ St. Ulphia’s Dead

Robert Welbourn Under Review:Under Review: St. Ulphia’s Dead. Scott Lambridis. Regal House Publishing, 2026. I saw a post recently on Bluesky that read (excuse the perhaps poor paraphrasing): there are two types of horror story: the door is open or the door is closed. I’d like to extrapolate this a little: there are two types of horror story: someone we know to be alive is acting dead, and someone we know to be dead is acting alive. St. Ulphia’s Dead, Scott Lambridis’ debut novel, falls into my categorisation. Something is terribly wrong in the small village of St. Ulphia, and the dead walk the streets. Lambridis’ novel follows Mirs, lead verifier for the Central Medical Compendium, or CMC—an encyclopedia of all known illnesses and conditions—as he travels to the small, isolated village of St. Ulphia to investigate a report produced by a scientist who visited ten years earlier. That scientist claimed—following testimonies from villagers and victims—that there was a wendigo haunting…