Folk Horror Short Stories (Beyond and Within) edited by Paul Kane & Marie O’Regan

Folk Horror Short Stories (Beyond and Within) edited by Paul Kane & Marie O’Regan

In Flame Tree Press’ latest anthology in their ‘Beyond & Within’ series, aiming to showcase a variety of writers, voices, and backgrounds, Paul Kane and Marie O’Regan bring together the various tributaries of folk horror to create a hardy repository of stories. Although it’s perhaps the broadest in scope of the ‘Beyond & Within’ series, it doesn’t play second fiddle because of that; if anything, the range of imaginations it conglomerates forms a staunch bastion of stories, and Kane and O’Regan’s introduction is worth a perusal just to get a feel of how considered the whole thing is. Complete with beautiful cover, the anthology isn’t afraid to transplant you from the cosier realms of reality to its darker, untamed regions, and from the first moment you’ll wonder the kind of Pandora’s box you have opened… 

Opening the anthology is ‘The White Road’, a slice of poetry from Neil Gaiman which takes Grimm’s ‘The Robber Bridegroom’ as inspiration and flips it on its head. It’s a nice segue into the anthology, offering a softer approach beneficial to the twitchy, foreboding nature of folk horror, and Gaiman’s style here captures the noir and fairytale side of sub-genre well. It does however suffer in this anthology’s setting – it hits the theme perfectly, but the context does somewhat get lost, and a less diligent reader might find it quite an alienating introduction.

From there however, the upward trajectory is just that.

John Connolly’s story picks up the reins of the folk horror chariot with M.R. Jamesian vigour. His story, ‘The Well’, is an affair as subtle as a shadow, and just as unnerving the longer you think about it: an expedition is sent out, on the orders of the infamous Augustus Pitt Rivers, to investigate a Familist settlement in Hexhamshire, whereat they find a well predating the ruins surrounding it as well as a woman buried alive.

Connolly pours spookiness into his stories, whether it’s with the atmosphere earlier on, or with the twists and turns which befall the characters later on. In fact, although atmosphere is key to folk horror (as this anthology proves), Connolly wields it in the most hostile way, drawing a line between uncertainty and forbidden knowledge, then continually dashing it to shreds until you don’t know which way is up.

Undoubtedly, the way he lets the reader decide which events are true and false is far from being a cop-out, instead it becomes enough of a theme in and of itself to be creepy and always keeps you one loose stone away from falling into an abyss of true mystery. For all it can hardly be said to tread new ground, it splendidly reflects the works of some of the genre’s masters to create something visceral – a very palpable hit for so early in the anthology.

Connolly’s story isn’t the solitary traditional tale in this anthology, manipulating atmosphere to considerable effect.

Lee Murray’s contribution, ‘Summer Bonus’, is just as much about atmosphere, but in a very different way. Two unalike people, Kate and Laurel, have been sent by their mutual friend Fiona to Pine Farm, a farm in New Zealand seemingly hybridising “The Colony” from ‘The Howling’ and Royston Vasey – and after three months of living there, the final job at the farm rears its head with ugly consequences…

Rather than the old sitting amongst the new, this story finds the new entering the world of the old; to that end it’s unafraid to show just how strange the clash of those two worlds can be – but, with characters, not creatures. Murray shows the contemplative side of horror, and the uncomfortable side of this story is as much from how claustrophobic it feels as it is a demonstration of how you don’t need grandiose displays of Pagan religion or doom-laden witchery to create folk horror, just a setting which oppressed and alienates in the subtlest ways possible. To that end, her prose is extremely easy to read, and when that final twist comes, it does so like a delayed train crash – it’s only once it’s too late do you realise just how enjoyably off-the-rails this story has gone. 

From Katie Young comes ‘The Druid Stone’, another story more straightforward in its telling

Concerning a woman returning home to a wood she hasn’t visited in almost two decades only to find that all the myths about it in fact have a nasty bite and when she comes across a bickering couple that bite only worsens. Young’s story does everything you want and reaches an appropriately creepy note, painting an unsympathetic picture of agrestic landscapes with enough twinges of nastiness to hold your attention. It’s just a shame the narrative voice (the 1st person) doesn’t quite suit the story’s tone, making the whole affair slightly stodgy and not quite pacy enough for the myriad of creepy ideas woven into it. Not a bad yarn by any means, just one that doesn’t quite come together to give the gut-punch that it ought to.

The evocative gap between quieter, atmospheric horror and the unabashed world of creature feature is where Stephen Volk and B. Zelkovich’s two tales sit. Stephen Volk pens ‘Blessed Mary’, a story with firmer Pagan roots than malefic otherworldliness; his tendencies to galvanise fear through signs and symbols allow this story to fit into the anthology like a glove. When a man and his wife return to Penfahod in Wales for their Christmas celebrations, the local Mari Lwyd custom brings back unpleasant memories of a past partner for the latter, after which an anxiety-ridden edge begins to develop.

It’s a fast-paced affair, and Volk evokes terror through simply a notion of folklore

Which he grounds with emotions and traditions of his native Wales. Lovers of Dennis Wheatley will find a nicotine patch in the form of this story, Wheatley’s unique brand of occultism and rituals simmering about beneath this story without ever bubbling over. The scares are more thrills than shocks, but along with them comes after a miniature deep-dive into a pool of paranoia and anxiety, the deepest end of which is a committed surge of rising tension.

As for B. Zelkovich, her story

‘The Finest Creation of an Artful God’ is a tale far more tenebrous and sinewy than the artistic title might suggest. The story plants seeds of body horror which don’t truly sprout until the final few pages, beforehand bearing the trappings of a Dickensian or Edgar Allan Poe narrative. What begins as a man called Theo eventually inviting an old woman in from the cold soon morphs into a bargain which will leave him deep in the weeds.

It’s a remarkably slow-burning affair, to the story’s credit, and as you turn the page there’s something really quite creepy in how intangible the terror feels despite the descriptions offered. The balance of human and inhuman is very nicely done, turning its nose up at even the notion of camp. Instead, it paints a silhouette of nature’s evil side and mocks you with that. As quieter horror goes, it’s an effective tale, with a doleful aura tuned just right.

There are a number of patently creature feature tales collected by Kane and O’Regan.

The first of which is the Jen Williams-penned story, ‘Rabbitheart’, offering a folk horror tale which picks up on some of the stranger aspects of the genre. When a young woman, Mira, discovers a young boy in a rabbit trap, the boy slowly inveigles his way into the family, to malign consequences.

On the surface, it’s the story of a changeling-like creature and family dysfunction; beneath the surface however, it ascends beyond the fact it isn’t the most inventive of tales and focuses on planting seeds of anxiety, the roots from which know how to tap into your mental vulnerability. Although the ending reaches a crescendo in a predictable way, the slipstream around it contains a slow-burn barrage of nervousness, capitalising on what horror short stories can do best – intimate tales chock full of downward spirals.

Adam L. G. Nevill pens the next of the creature-feature stories, and his contribution

‘The Original Occupant’, perhaps unsurprisingly, is set in the same world as his infamous novel THE RITUAL (adapted for film in 2017). Nevill’s story explores the plight of an academic who moves to a remote area of Sweden, Rådalen, and with it offering another variety of creature-feature, at the same time educing the Victorian love of pseudo-epistolary form.

The tale is told from the perspective of the academic’s two friends, the latter of whom later visits his remote home to find that their friend’s midlife crisis has had unexpected ramifications. While it helps to know of Nevill’s ‘The Ritual’, ‘The Original Occupant’ is at its hearts a channel of all things pagan, subtle, and nasty, and it’s all too easy to see how a production company such as ‘A24’ could adapt this story for their creepy canon. It’s one of the more atavistic stories collected, offering an unflinching twist of the knife in your gut despite the fact so much is still left to the imagination.

‘The Great White’ is the next tale entrenched in the creature feature side of horror, and it finds itself in that genre with a kind of irrepressible, ‘come-hither’ energy. The main character, Cole, is contacted by a brother-in-arms he last saw eight years previous, Jim Blakes, who asks for his assistance in tracking down and killing a cannibalistic beast from North American folklore, the Wendigo.

Benjamin Spada’s offering,

His story makes a link to a piece of well-known American history, and one it’s surprising hasn’t been done before, and in multiple ways Spada’s story is a refreshing escapade. While his prose doesn’t offer much in the way of gung-ho, pulpy madness, it’s written with genuine perspicuity and a willing to batter you over the head and run away before the stars have stopped spinning. That skill is what helps to keep Spada’s tale so enjoyably to-the-point, containing twists and turns that are sprinkled into the narrative, each pressing against your nerves like some kind of horror acupressure; straightforward though it is on the surface, by the end what creeps up on you is the realisation of how changed both you and the tale itself is by them.

The next bestial malevolence found this anthology is perhaps one of folklore’s more recognisable

: a black dog. It’s Alison Littlewood in ‘Good Boy’ who deals with it first, plugging the story full of emotion and determined to prove that its titular animal’s bark is just as painful as its bite. In the aftermath of a strange encounter, unhappy couple Daniel and Helen end up taking in a black dog; the dog continually grows, having a more profound effect on events while their marriage tumbles further and further into the abyss of depression from where return is impossible.

It’s fair to say that if you want a story that bleeds with foreboding and melancholy palpable and subtle in equal measure, Littlewood offers up a prime candidate here. The story has enough clemency to be a more relaxing affair compared to most of folk horror’s offerings – at first. By the end, it avoids jading itself by making you expect twists and turns, it’s about miniature autopsy of the human condition with folk horror as the blade to help you open the story up. 

The other black dog on the prowl is

‘The Grim’ by Cavan Scott, where grumpy fiction is the order of the day. A camping holiday goes awry, leaving Ben, his sister Anna, and his two children, Kaylee and Noah, with no refuge except for a dilapidated church – at the same time, Noah thinks his best friend Eli, who recently died, is after them. Every idea Scott uses here employs tried-and-tested shocks and scares, yet in a way esoteric to the tale. Though it later on has the snarl of a creature feature, there’s lots of nightmare fuel earlier on, and the story takes care to sculpt something raw, relatable. Mostly, Scott focuses equally on the grief-stricken child and the angry-yet-determined father, so while the story is one of the less memorable ones, there’s something high-octane yet quiet and choleric going on.

The final of the creature feature entries comes in the form of a timey-wimey tale,

‘The Third Curse’ from Helen Grant, where the Sithichean, the people inhabiting fairy pools of Grant’s native Scotland, try to reach an accord with humanity only to end up betrayed. The story is told from the perspective of three iterations of the same character, and as everything progresses it has a vivid charm, letting the darker, jaundiced commentary of humanity do its work. The fantasy edge is mostly effective too. Grant tethers enough to the human world for the collision of worlds to service the folk horror genre well. And, ultimately, the Sithichean realm is explored to just the right extent to give you all the flavours of their world without dwarfing any of the foreboding.

In an offshoot of the branch of folklore that MIDSOMMAR (2019) made famous for a new generation, Kane and O’Regan also present two very distinct stories concerning weddings, one from Kathryn Healy and one from Christina Sng. Kathryn Healy presents ‘The Lights Under Rachel’, where a woman called Kaleisha is contacted by her sister Amy and invited to her “Lightspring” wedding on the island of Rachel; to the former’s dismay, she finds far more to a Lightspring ceremony than meets the eye, and a groom with a sinister agenda, the conclusion of which is predictable but fittingly morbid.

However, Healy manages a number of successful curveballs and the internal workings of the story are more left field than you might expect, the folk horror bleeding in via almost ritualistic alienation. It’s a story that’s very determined, knowing what it wants to tell with unnerving ebullience, and you can’t help but ponder whether it’s a story born out of a hatred of MAMMA MIA (2008).

‘Pontianak: An Origin Story’ goes in a very different direction,

With the wedding simply a springboard into something far darker. Christina Sng delivers a story that subtly chips away at those with weak stomachs, where a woman willingly given over to the “Master” to be one of his brides has very sinister ramifications, the eventual upshot of which is a conclusion you can’t help but love despite the lachrymose sense of revenge. Sng worms poignancy in under the radar and adds a feminist perspective to folk horror that really works. The heart of the story is edgy and brutal, and the Malaysian piece of folklore comes in a little late in the day since your mind will be full of the story’s brutality, yet the two combine to make something almost the sum of its parts, and undoubtedly something with bite and that’s stick in your memory.

Fantasy and fable can also be found colouring the folk horror in H. R. Laurence and V. Castro’s contributions

Even if the latter is more effective. ‘The Marsh-Widow’s Bargain’ by H. R. Laurence deals with a fantasy world where a corpse-witch and the Leopard-of-the-Water are battling. Though not a damp squib, compared to the other stories, it is a vaguely moist squib. The problem isn’t actually the plot or prose, since amid the fast pace and dynamic conflicts there is also a good narrative effected with tenacity; yet, as a story where fantasy happens within fantasy, it’s a slight struggle to find the clash of old and new which folk horror manipulates so well. Therefore, no matter how good the story is, its placement in an anthology of other, more grounded stories reduces its impact and own individuality, which is a shame. 

In a story similar in vibe but with a very different nervous system, V. Castro presents ‘Pilgrimage of the Hummingbird’. In her contribution, a post-apocalyptic community endures via a reestablishment of the Aztec society, integrating a tale of survival with the more sordid aspects of Godly worship. Given how the mesoamerican culture is woven in, her story flirts with the fantastical but never tongue kisses it; at all times, Castro pushes a darker tang, where the Aztec community exploits another group of outsiders despite the unlikelier elements. When her own voice as a writer shouts, echoing romance in unusual places and dimming the darker areas of folklore further, it’s a literary equivalent of 5.1 surround sound.

O’Regan and Kane guide the anthology full circle in the final story

A poem by Linda D. Addison, ‘Ghost Land of Giants’. It is a slice of folk horror both short and sweet, best read rather than described; suffice to say it’s the right note to end the anthology on, and amid the many oscillations of emotion the folk horror finds a home within, it’s a gentle, quieter note, alluring and acuminated in a single bound.

This then is one of the quieter examples of horror, allowing you to get comfy and not notice how sinister its intravenous drip of horror is. Exuding ambience and chilling creature feature rather than splatter and blood-curdling shocks, Kane and O’Regan collect a fine cabal of authors and know where to shine their spotlight – which makes it ironic maybe that this anthology’s greatest asset is how it undoubtedly leaves you wanting to turn the light back on and forgo sleep until daylight has returned.

Folk Horror Short Stories (Beyond and Within) edited by by Paul Kane (Editor), Marie O’Regan

A new anthology of Folk Horror stories, covering a wide range of mythologies and dark corners from around the world, revealing tales from the shadows of isolation, creepy forests and horrors rising from the land itself. Award-winning anthologists Paul Kane and Marie O’Regan have commissioned and chosen an outstanding selection of stories with contributions from authors including Neil Gaiman, John Connolly, Adam L.G. Nevill, Alison Littlewood and Jen Williams. Five brand new stories have also been selected from open submissions.

The full list of featured authors in this book is: Linda D. Addison, V. Castro, John Connolly, Neil Gaiman, Helen Grant, Kathryn Healy, H.R. Laurence, Alison Littlewood, Lee Murray, Adam L.G. Nevill, Cavan Scott, Christina Sng, Benjamin Spada, Stephen Volk, Jen Williams, Katie Young and B. Zelkovich.

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