Booze, romance and an otherworldly stalker.
Saffron is the eerie debut literary novel by Cheshire author Justin Hughes. A coming-of-age, university campus story turned psychological horror.
"He was connected with the world in an ancient-curse sort of way, in a like-it-or-not sort of way, and he was quite ready for it all to be over."
University fresher, Toby Shire, moves to a Welsh seaside town to escape his grief-stricken home life. Instead, he finds himself stalked by a glowing, cloaked figure that only he can see—and each time it appears, it draws closer. His mother believes it’s a sign from God, his professor suggests a psychological phenomenon, but it's Toby who must decide the true nature of his tormentor before it's too late—before it reaches him.
Hughes, previously published as part of the 2025 issue of the University of Chester's literary magazine Pandora's Box, revisits the themes of faith and spiritual torment in this debut novel. Set in a Welsh seaside town's university campus, Saffron will be a treat for lovers of The Secret History by Donna Tartt or The Lessons by Naomi Alderman.
Booze, romance and an otherworldly stalker.
Saffron is the eerie debut literary novel by Cheshire author Justin Hughes. A coming-of-age, university campus story turned psychological horror.
"He was connected with the world in an ancient-curse sort of way, in a like-it-or-not sort of way, and he was quite ready for it all to be over."
University fresher, Toby Shire, moves to a Welsh seaside town to escape his grief-stricken home life. Instead, he finds himself stalked by a glowing, cloaked figure that only he can see—and each time it appears, it draws closer. His mother believes it’s a sign from God, his professor suggests a psychological phenomenon, but it's Toby who must decide the true nature of his tormentor before it's too late—before it reaches him.
Hughes, previously published as part of the 2025 issue of the University of Chester's literary magazine Pandora's Box, revisits the themes of faith and spiritual torment in this debut novel. Set in a Welsh seaside town's university campus, Saffron will be a treat for lovers of The Secret History by Donna Tartt or The Lessons by Naomi Alderman.
‘Do you believe in God?’ Toby asked, gazing out to sea.
‘I don’t know,’ Emily replied.
Toby dipped his head to see his shoes, smiling at the thought. He was open-minded enough to ask that question, but not so pretentious, and certainly not so confident, that he could keep a straight face doing so.
‘Do you?’ Emily asked, standing beside him as they leaned forward on the flimsy, old wooden fence behind the sandy beach.
The wind battered her long, dark hair as she held her gaze. Toby hesitated to answer her question. The truth was, he didn’t. He didn’t hold an ounce of belief – or faith – but he wanted to more than anything. He longed for that kind of spiritual, otherworldly safety net.
‘Yeah, maybe,’ Toby lied.
‘And which god would that be?’
‘Never thought that far ahead, I guess.’
And that was it. That was where the God conversation ended for the day. It was that sort of huge, impossible idea that Toby would’ve loved to talk about for hours longer, but he simply had no basis to do so. What he had really hoped for was that Emily might have replied with a loud and enthusiastic ‘Yes!’ to the God question. Maybe then she could have told Toby about all of her dozens of life-altering spiritual experiences, about the magical effect of incorporating prayer into one’s life, or about the path to redemption for those who have sinned. Alas, she was as much an agnostic atheist as Toby.
Shame, he thought. Emily smirked as the subject matter crumbled. She’d only known Toby for a couple of days, but had already grown fond of the sporadic brain vomit he’d interject into any conversation he could.
‘Should we head off, then?’ Toby suggested as he looked up from his shoes and glanced at Emily, who seemed to be a little lost in thought herself, tracing the horizon with her dark, green eyes.
She turned to Toby and nodded. The pair began walking down the cobbled pavement, attempting to enjoy the sunny weather despite the aggressive, frankly unnecessary, wind that continued to ruffle them about like a high school bully. They were headed to The Old Owl, the first go-to pub their newly established shared friend group had discovered since moving for university. Before venturing too far, however, Toby turned back for a moment to soak in the view of the open sea one last time before he entered the dark tavern to get pissed out of his mind until the depths of the night.
There it all was: miles and miles of open water, golden piles of sand covering the shore, the odd few deformed, shell-covered sandcastles dotted under the great, big, blue summer sky. It’s beautiful, he thought, much like most of the Welsh seaside town.
Something else caught Toby’s attention, too, far down the beach. It appeared either to be in the water or hovering above it. So distant and small. It was hard to see clearly. It was some kind of shape, glowing in a saffron-yellow shade. Toby turned back to see where he was going, glancing momentarily at Emily, who walked beside him.
‘Did you see that?’ Toby asked.
‘See what?’
‘The yellow thing. On the sea.’
Emily gave Toby a puzzled look, having no idea what he was talking about.
Toby turned back to catch another glimpse, but they were already too far to get another good look. It wasn’t worth walking back for. She must’ve missed it, he thought. Besides, it was probably nothing. Perhaps an inflatable, or some kind of cloth flag strung to a buoy, blowing in the wind by the sea. Strange though, he thought, the way it stood out.
The pair approached the entrance to The Old Owl. It was a relatively popular pub, one of the town’s top picks for fresher students, fake-ID-owning teenagers, and the odd few forty-five-year-old, mid-life-crisis-ridden men who were under the misguided impression that they were going to miraculously attract some much younger men or women.
The building had a stone brick exterior, adorned with flowing green ivy and a steeply pitched rooftop, its red brick chimney exhaling clouds of dark smoke. As Toby and Emily entered the building, they were greeted by two other friends they’d recently gotten to know after moving to the town.
‘How are we, chaps?’ called out Blake, combing his slicked-back hair with his fingers.
Blake was a trust-fund posh lad from Bristol. A player. A full-blown sesh-head. He had signed up for a medical course. Since his parents were happy to pay the tuition loans, he thought he’d stay in education for as long as he could. He’d become a high-paid surgeon, he figured. He was also the kind of guy who could be a real pain in the arse to have a feud with. But as a friend, which is what he had been so far to Toby, he was decent. He and Emily were similar in some ways. They shared the same striking bluntness and dry humour. Emily, however, was more mellow. More put-together, some might say.
‘Alright, yeah,’ Toby replied. ‘Who else is about?’
‘Hiya, you two!’ greeted Sanya, shuffling over to answer Toby’s question. She had come from almost the exact opposite end of the country as Blake, up in the north-east of England. She wore denim overalls over an orange cardigan, decorated with floral-themed pins and badges she’d haggled for in a car boot sale the previous month.
Emily gave them both a nod and a smile, signalling to Sanya to accompany her to the bar to get drinks. They communicated through a unique language of eye movements and subtle facial expressions that they seemed to have developed over the past week.
The interior of the pub was warm and cosy, fitted with red sofas against heavily postered and painting-covered walls. Old vinyl records and photographs sat on display units on each side of the main room, which itself was filled with a collection of glossy oak tables and barstools. It wasn’t a particularly large place, but it was spacious enough to accommodate the herds of students who passed in and out of it every day.
Blake, with a pint of beer in one hand, wrapped his opposite arm around Toby’s shoulders, giving him what may well have been the single most devious grin a man had ever mustered.
‘I’m pulling tonight,’ he exclaimed. He turned to the girls at the bar for a moment, brushing off the sides of his white vest, before swiftly turning back so as not to be caught. ‘What do you think of Emily?’ he asked.
Toby froze up, unsure how to answer. He smiled awkwardly and pretended not to hear.
‘Sorry?’
‘What do you think of Emily?’ he repeated.
‘She’s… cool, yeah.’
Blake’s grin widened. He nodded his head in the direction of a four-seater table next to them. As they approached and took a seat, Blake pried.
‘Like, are you two… you know…’ he said, avoiding any bold statements, ‘or are you just mates?’
Toby’s heart sank into his chest. This topped the God question. This one was actually impossible to answer. To even speculate would be the mistake of a madman. He and Emily were just friends, really, but Toby didn’t want to state such so explicitly. He didn’t want to indirectly friend-zone a girl like her. A girl like Emily.
‘Yeah, we’re just friends.’ Shit. Shouldn’t have said that, he thought. ‘But, like…’ he continued, looking for the words to save himself, until the girls appeared once again.
‘Hiya, lads,’ Emily said as she and Sanya sat down with them, and Blake gave Toby a look as if to say he understood.
As Toby made his way over to the bar himself, he pondered the rattling thoughts that were bouncing around his head like bingo balls in a cage. He thought about Emily. He thought about where he saw the next three years of his life going. He thought about that damn yellow shape he had seen on the sea.
The image was still so clear, as if he were still looking at it. That shape. It was such a small, insignificant thing, but he just couldn’t stop thinking about it. It was as if it had burnt itself into his brain, sitting dormant, waiting for him to return.
‘I’ll just take one of these,’ Toby said to the bartender, pointing to the cheapest beer the pub had on draft. ‘And a shot of vodka, please.’
It was one of those nights. Toby was going to top all six of the previous days he’d been out in town, bladdered out of his mind. That was the big plan. The week’s grand finale… But there it was again. That thought. That image. That yellow shape. Refusing to fade. Silently yelling through the mind fog.
I’m still here, it said. Can you remember what I look like?
Toby contemplated going back out to the shore, just to see, to check if it was still there. To check why, in his short-term memory of the thing, it had glowed so bright, so distinctly. It was unnatural. Unless, of course, he was misremembering.
‘Here you go,’ the bartender smiled as she placed Toby’s drinks down in front of him.
She said something about the price next, but Toby didn’t listen. He tapped his phone on the card reader thoughtlessly and zoned in on that thought in his head.
He had to go. Just a look. Just to see.
Toby downed the vodka shot, with a wince and grunt, and then took a huge gulp of his pint before heading for the pub’s exit. His friends darted confused looks at him, but he didn’t catch a single one. He was consumed by complete, unbreakable tunnel vision.
‘Toby?’ Blake called out, watching him head for the exit.
He pushed through the door and stepped outside. The wind had settled tremendously. The sun had begun to set, faster than would be expected. He wandered back down the long cobbled road, wondering why he was so drawn to it, but accepting that he was.
Strangely, though, the closer he got to the beach, the more that image burning in his mind began to fade. The pull he felt was loosening until he finally reached a close enough distance from the shore to see the exact spot he had seen the saffron-yellow shape in the first place… And it was nowhere to be seen. No inflatable. No cloth flag in the wind. No glow. Nothing.
Toby kept pacing forward down the road to get a better look. He wandered closer and closer until he reached the wooden fencing once again. Taking his time, he scanned the horizon, trying to find any sign of it. No longer fuelled by the magnetic urge, but by genuine confusion. He was confused about where it might have gone, if it was ever really there, and most importantly, why he just did that.
What if he had just seen another student, having an afternoon swim in their favourite yellow swimsuit? That was entirely possible, Toby knew that.
Several minutes had passed. No luck. No shape. He had just ditched all of his new friends to go stare at nothing on the beach. He’d have to make something up. He just needed some air, maybe. The vodka shot didn’t go down so well, and he needed some air. That’s what he would tell his friends. They had nothing to worry about.
Spoilers: Justin Hughes’s potentially supernatural horror novel Saffron is not overly scary so much as it is eerie and ominous. It concerns a situation that could be supernatural or psychological. We are encountering a protagonist who is either seeing ghosts or losing his sanity.
Toby, a British boarding school going teen, suffered tremendous loss and is depressed.
He sees a strange saffron figure in the distance. As the figure gets closer, Toby thinks that this figure is stalking him. However his friends and family don't see anything and wonder if he is heading towards a psychotic break.
This book depends on a sense of eeriness in an unknown situation not so much with ghosts or other creatures that are upfront with a history. The figure is the main horror in the novel. It begins gradually and grows into an overwhelming presence in Toby's life.
The book alternates between Toby's point of view and those of other characters. Some of the creepiest chapters are the ones told by Toby's friends. They see their friend looking in a specific direction and yell at something to keep away from him or suddenly quake with fear.
When they ask him what's wrong, he doesn't tell them for fear that they think that he is going crazy (though he is running that risk anyway). His friends can't help because they can't see or hear anything. Is Toby losing his mind?
In their defense, Toby has suffered from emotional turmoil. His father and brother died and he, his mother, and sister are having a difficult time coping. In fact, Toby prefers to be at school than at home.
He also has difficulties at school and with his classmates. Besides their concerns about Toby's sanity, there are several love shapes going on. A female friend of Toby’s has a crush on him, while he has a crush on another female friend, who is dating a boy, who is also attracted to an older guy.
All of these relationships hover around Toby’s spectral encounters which increases his emotional instability and inability to confide in his friends and family about what's happening making him lonelier than ever.
What is haunting Toby isn't just this spectral figure. What is haunting him are the emotions that he feels and is unable to express: loneliness, isolation, alienation, anxiety, grief. The feelings that one gets when they are surrounded by people and yet feel like they are the last person on Earth. He is isolated not just by this figure but by himself.