Five stories, one cold current, and old gods who do not care about us.
AV Wilkes made her name in the ice, but Old Gods proves she can chill you anywhere. This short cosmic horror collection pulls together five reprinted tales, from a doomed 1881 whaling ship to a dying English seaside hotel to a wood on the shortest day of the year. Fans of her polar horror novels will know the cold, the queer longing, and the creeping folk dread. Newcomers will find the perfect door into her work. Across weird fiction, exploration Gothic and the folk horror revival, Wilkes writes people who are lonely and real, then hands them to something older and hungrier.
AV Wilkes writes cold that gets into your bones and dark that wants something back. Old Gods gathers five lonely, longing, dangerous stories and runs one cold current under them all. She makes you care, then does the worst thing she can. A short book that leaves a deep mark.
Old Gods by AV Wilkes: A Cold, Queer Cosmic Horror Collection
Old Gods | AV Wilkes | Independent | 11 May 2026 |
A man rises out of the Arctic sea like a seal. The water sits a few degrees above freezing. He does not flinch. That is the first thing you meet in Old Gods, and it tells you how the whole book will go. AV Wilkes writes cold that gets into your bones. She writes dark that seems to want something back from you.
Here is what Old Gods does to you. It slows your pulse, then makes it jump. Wilkes builds dread the patient way. She lets the quiet stretch until you start filling it in yourself.
Take the story set in a dying seaside hotel. There is a grandfather clock in a windowless room, and it ticks and ticks while a young waitress serves three silent guests. Nothing much happens for pages. That is the point. The wrongness leaks in at the edges. The waitress keeps the garlic close, and later the silver, and you slowly grasp what she is really up against. By then you feel sick with her.
The pacing never rushes. Wilkes trusts the slow build. A meteorite comes up out of the pack ice, and the crew start to vanish one by one. A social worker sits in a warm front room and cannot hear the church bells right outside. A soldier keeps seeing a wall of white move down the trench towards him. None of it shouts. All of it lands.
The transcript story pulls the same trick a different way. A social worker sits before a panel and explains what happened one Christmas. She is chatty, sure of herself, a little smug. The rain hums on the tape. You can feel the ground shift under her every answer, long before she can. Wilkes lets you run ahead of the speaker, and the gap between what she saw and what you see is where the horror lives.
There is humour too, though it runs dry and dark. The hotel gets by on penny-pinching and stale bread rolls passed from one table to the next. Wilkes has a sharp eye for the small cruelties of low-paid work. She lets you laugh, then turns the knife.
The five stories talk to each other, as well. The same motifs keep surfacing. Winter dark. A glowing white thing. A sun that might not come back. Something tall that stands and watches. You start to feel one cold current running under all of them, and it pulls the book together far better than most single-author collections manage.
Now the writing itself. Wilkes writes short. She writes clean. Her sentences do a lot with very little, and she knows just when to stop. Reading her prose is like watching someone gut a fish. It is quick, it is sure, there is no waste, and there is more blood than you expect.
She loves a good point of view. One story comes to you as a tribunal transcript, all stage notes and stammered answers, with the rain drumming down the whole time. You only ever hear one side. You work the rest out for yourself, and that is far worse than being told. Another goes the other way, deep into one woman’s head as she walks into a wood on the shortest day of the year. Her Seasonal Affective Disorder is not a spare part bolted on. It is the engine of the whole thing.
The small touches are where Wilkes really shines. A blinded boy in a hospital bed murmurs “all gleamy white” and will not stop. A girl whispers “at least I had my time” into a social worker’s ear. These lines sit in your head long after you shut the book. Wilkes knows that the right five words beat a page of gore.
So what is this book about, under the ice and the blood?
It is about the things we turn into gods. Fear. Grief. Guilt. Longing. The title does no decoration. Every story holds an old power, something that came long before the church and the state and our tidy modern lives. A rock from the black between the stars. A sun that must be coaxed back each winter or it will slink off like a beaten dog. A family who have owned the same hotel since before anyone can recall. These are the old gods, and they do not care about us at all.
Wilkes keeps circling one idea. The modern world is thin, and something older pushes up from beneath it. A social worker with her tick boxes and her harm matrix cannot see what is really in that house. A woman counts her daylight hours on an app while an ancient tree waits for her on the hill. We think we have left all this behind. Wilkes hints that we have only papered over it.
Desire runs through the book as well, and it runs queer. Two men fall for each other on a doomed whaling ship. A decorated officer hides his true nature under a wedding ring worn on a chain. Wilkes writes this longing with real care, then sets it against a world that would punish it. The horror and the love feed off each other.
There is class and migration here too, handled with a steady hand. The waitress is foreign, poor, and easy to throw away, and the hotel swallows girls like her while nobody asks a thing. The real monster might be the agency that shipped her in, not the thing up in the attic. Wilkes lets both be true at once.
If you have read Wilkes before, you will feel at home in the cold. Her two novels, All the White Spaces and Where the Dead Wait, both live in the polar regions. The first plays out in the Antarctic just after the Great War. The second heads into the Victorian Arctic, into cannibalism and grief. Both put queer people at the centre and let the ice do its worst.
Old Gods shows you where those novels grew from. The opening story first ran in a magazine back in 2021, before her debut. It sets a whaling and mining crew loose off Spitzbergen in 1881, hunting coal and a fallen rock from the sky. The period detail is exact and lived-in. You can smell the blubber and the tar. You can see the same drives taking shape there too: ice, isolation, forbidden love, a cold that feels alive.
The war story ties the polar world to the trenches of the First World War, and it is the sharpest piece in the set. A man survives the ice when a better man did not. He carries that guilt into the mud of the Western Front, where a tall figure with a peaked cap starts to visit the beds at night.
The book also shows range she does not get enough credit for. Not every tale sits in the snow. A dying English seaside town. A modern flat lit by a daylight lamp. A three-bed house on an estate at Christmas. Wilkes proves she can find the same dread in a bread basket that she finds on an ice floe. That is a real step, and it is good to watch.
One line from her second novel works as a key to the whole book. You make a god of the things you fear or love. Old Gods is that sentence, five times over.
So where does this sit in horror? Right at the meeting point of a few things that are all having their moment. There is the folk horror revival, the pagan dread you find in films like Midsommar and in novels like Andrew Michael Hurley’s The Loney. There is the cosmic strand, the sense that the universe is huge and does not care, which runs from Lovecraft down to now. And there is the quiet ghost story, the M. R. James and Robert Aickman line, where the fear is a feeling and not a jump scare.
Wilkes pulls from all three and makes them hers. If you love Michelle Paver’s Dark Matter, or Daphne du Maurier’s short stories, or the slow cold horror of Dan Simmons and The Terror, this is your patch. What sets Wilkes apart is the tenderness. Her people are lonely, longing, and real. She does not use them as fodder. She makes you care, then she does the worst thing she can.
For a book you can read in an evening, it leaves a deep mark. It is also a fine door into her work if you have not met her yet. Five stories, one cold current running under them all.
Old Gods knows just what it is doing. It leaves you out in the dark, watching the sun go down, half hoping that something on the hill will look back.
Old Gods by AV Wilkes
Old Gods collects five short stories from critically-acclaimed horror author Ally Wilkes.
Within this micro-collection on the ancient and strange:
A fallen meteorite lures an 1881 whaling and mining crew deep into the pack ice off Spitzbergen, and once the great alien rock is hauled aboard, men begin to vanish into the endless polar night, one by one.
A born-again social worker takes on the case of a gifted teenager who has gone badly off the rails, and grows ever closer to the girl’s calm, devout, unsettlingly happy parents, right up to the night before Christmas when she agrees to be present for something she can never take back;
An old and patient evil stalks a crumbling seaside hotel in a dying town, where migrant waitresses are worked to the bone, girls quietly disappear.
A decorated Antarctic explorer, haunted by the shipmate he could not save on the ice, returns from convalescence to the mud and gas of the Western Front, only to find that a tall figure with a peaked cap and shining eyes has followed him into the trenches.
And a woman worn down by Seasonal Affective Disorder reads about an ancient druid-oak deep in the woods, an old ceremony to turn the wheel of the sun and haul it back from the longest night, and sets off alone to peer through the crack in the trunk.
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