R. Slater

R. Slater

Who is R. Slater? A scholar of the uncanny. A witness to shadows. A voice you won’t soon forget.

R. Slater doesn’t just write about ancient orders and the secrets they guard. He inhabits their mindset.

His debut gothic horror novel, Dark Masquerade, invites readers into 1891 London, where six strangers are drawn into a battle against an ancient evil. It’s the kind of story only someone steeped in myth, language and the occult could craft.

A master of linguistics, history and the strange crossroads between humanity and transformation, Slater writes fiction shaped by a lifelong obsession with the hidden and the liminal.

He’s lived across continents, studied forgotten symbols and is known to vanish into his own research for weeks at a time. 🖤

Dark Masquerade

Book 1 in the Order of the Steel Rose

For fans of the esoteric, the dreadful and the beautifully sinister, prepare to enter a world where horror is real, secrets rot from within and the cost of truth is sanity.



Victorian London, 1891. Six strangers are summoned by cryptic invitation to the mysterious Order of the Steel Rose, a vanguard against an ancient and implacable evil.

Each of the six brings their own skills and expertise, as well as their own dark secrets.

To their horror, they learn that the supernatural is, in fact, very real. The hidden world they discover threatens not only their lives, but their sanity, as those secrets return to haunt them.

In the beating heart of the most populous city in the world, the six find themselves alone, battling against horrendous creatures lurking in the shadows, stalking people as prey.

Forced to engage in a terrible Dark Masquerade, straddling an invisible line between decorum and carnage, their actions set them on a dire path to discover what lies in the darkness...