Fiction Reviews
Beyond & Within
Folk Horror(2024) edited by Paul Kane & Marie O'Regan, Flame Tree Press,
£16.99 / Can$34.99 / US$26.99, hrdbk, 415pp, ISBN 978-1-804-17732-7
Anthology. Authors include Neil Gaiman, John Connolly, Adam L. G. Nevill, Alison Littlewood and Jen Williams.
Some story / poetry anthologies bear a mix of good, bad and middle-ground work, but this superb collection was 100% gems all the way for me, so with seventeen works to choose from, I can only really highlight a few. Some certainly stretch the definition of folk horror, and prove to be more general fantasy realm works. H. R. Laurence’s 'The Marsh Widow’s Bargain', for example, deals with a woman seeking revenge on a swamp dwelling shaman-necromancer. Everyone involved is fully aware of dark magic, so there is no sense of collision between ancient pagan beliefs or legends with modern Christian, or secular thinking.
A more traditional take and my favourite story in the collection is Jen Williams’s 'Rabbitheart'. It centres on a quiet remote rural community where a young farm girl ensnares an elven child in a rabbit-trap. She brings the strange boy home to help nurse him back to health, and as he grows and heals her family begin to decay and wither but she and they seem powerless to prevent the changes taking place. There are echoes of Lovecraft’s The Colour Out Of Space (1927) to this genuinely creepy tale.
B. Zelkovich also has a fairie encounter with a woman beguiled into an erotic longing for a beautiful forest woman who takes her horse away into the misty realms and begins transforming her too, though her desires make her cease caring what is lost. Helen Grant has another take on such realms with a story showing multiple riffs on the legend of Tír nAill. Of the men drawn to an elf-land of plenty, unaware that for each day that passes there, many years pass in ours, leading to shock, and sudden ageing on return to what we might naively call the real World.
I recently had a folk horror story of my own, 'Well Off The Beaten Track', published in The 11th BHF Book Of Horror Stories – Strange Folk, Dark Places (2024 – BHF Press), so seeing a story in this book that also features an evil well, 'The Well', by John Connolly, I was worried the stories might be too similar but I needn’t have feared. Connolly’s tale deals with a team of archaeologists stumbling on an old well and corpses buried by it in ritual sacrifices involving the roots of strange fauna, which hungers that may not yet be satiated.
All the stories were specially written for this book, and some, like 'The Well', would not be out of place in Edwardian anthologies alongside works by M. R. James.
In Lee Murray’s 'Summer Bonus', two friends visit a New Zealand beach village where there is an unusual seaweed the community seem quite guarded towards, and they warn the women that one must kill the other to serve its needs to gain a bonus reward. How the situation plays out is truly unexpected and chilling. One of the best twist endings I have seen in many years.
Alison Littlewood’s 'Good Boy' is about a dog who is anything but good. A man takes care of it from discovering it as a puppy despite seeing a neighbour kill its demonic mother. His wife, fearful of the dog, leaves him as the dog takes vengeance on their neighbour, and her passiveness towards Gary (as she names the beast), consumes her.
A varied range of often genuinely scary tales, all of the highest quality. A very handsomely presented hardback edition too.
Arthur Chappell
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