A Short Story Collection by J.F. Penn
The Buried and the Drowned
Some things are not meant to be forgotten.
Eleven dark stories and a poem, drawn from the landscapes that hold ancient power and human secrets: a black church on an Icelandic lava field, a luminous cave forty metres beneath the Pacific, a sealed Templar vault under Paris, a drowned Egyptian city, and a timber circle rising from a Norfolk beach.
Each story carries its own author's note on the real places and personal history behind it, including The Black Church, written for this collection after a midwinter journey to Iceland.
We are all, in some way, either buried or drowned.
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The research behind the book
The Black Church of Budir
Budakirkja is real: a tar-black timber church on the Snaefellsnes peninsula, in the shadow of the glacier that inspired Journey to the Centre of the Earth. Jo visited on her fiftieth birthday, March 2025.
Learn more → New ZealandThe Poor Knights Islands
Jacques Cousteau named this volcanic marine reserve one of the world's top dive sites. Jo dived it many times and became a PADI Dive Master here.
Learn more →The Templars of the Marais
The papal bull Militia Dei of 1145 is real, and 2007 renovations at the Carreau du Temple uncovered a Templar cemetery beneath modern Paris.
The drowned city of Thonis-Heracleion
Egypt's greatest port sank beneath the Mediterranean and vanished by the eighth century AD. Rediscovered in 2000, its colossal statues still lie in the silt.
Learn more →Seahenge and the sacred spring
In 1998 shifting sands revealed a Bronze Age circle of fifty-five oak posts at Holme-next-the-Sea. And beneath Bath, the spring of the goddess Sulis still holds Roman curse tablets.
