You finish it. And you feel the dirt, that metaphorical dirt, still there. Under your nails. In the creases of your skin. A residue of Scratch Moss. It doesn’t wash off easy. Barnett hasn’t just written a novel; he’s conducted a séance for a whole way of life, and the thing that haunted it. And the echo of Red Clogs, walking somewhere down below, lingers long after you close the cover.

Funny thing about dirt. It gets under your fingernails, of course, but it’s the weight of it, the sheer compacted history of it, that Barnett makes you feel in your bones with Scratch Moss. This isn’t soil for growing things. It’s a lid.

And you know, coming back to his work after the first two, you can almost see him tunnelling down, book by book, to get to this point. Withered Hill was the surface dig, the probe into the genre’s topsoil. Then Scuttler’s Cove went deeper, into the clay and the damp. But this one. This one hits the coal seam itself, the dark, compressed vein where the real pressure lies. It’s the third, and it feels like the culmination. The one where he wasn’t just writing a folk horror story, he was channelling the literal ground beneath a whole community’s feet.

A five-timeline tale, they say. And that sounds like a gimmick in lesser hands. But here, it’s the only way this story could be told. Because the horror at Scratch Moss isn’t an event; it’s a condition. It’s a slow bleed across centuries. You start in 2025 with Joe, a writer dragged back to his hometown for a funeral, and the past is just there, waiting for him like a bad debt.

Then you’re pulled down the shaft, 1985, 1945, 1905, 1865, each era not a flashback but another layer of the same wound. The genius is in the forward momentum. You don’t feel like you’re moving backwards in time. You feel like you’re moving downward. Into the pit. Each generation’s confrontation with the thing under the manor, the thing they call Red Clogs, isn’t a repeat. It’s a deepening. A scar forming over an older, angrier scar.

That’s where Barnett leaves his first two books in the dust, I think. Withered Hill played with locale, with a sense of place. Scuttler’s Cove with community secrets. Scratch Moss fuses them. The place is the secret. The community’s bond, forged in the daily danger of the mines, becomes its own kind of prison. Joe tries to get a taxi home from the station, gives the village name, and the driver just refuses. Flat out refuses. That’s isolation you can taste. Not magical barriers or haunted woods. Just human reputation, thick and impenetrable as fog. No one leaves. Or if they do, they come back. The land, and what’s under it, won’t allow you to just walk away.

Which brings us to Red Clogs. What a brilliantly mundane, terrifying name. No ancient demonic title. No Latin invocation. Just the sound of something walking in the dark below. A bogeyman for a specific place. Kidnaps children, the stories say. But Barnett is too clever for a simple monster. Red Clogs is more a symptom. A pressure valve for the land’s misery.

You dig up its coal, its wealth, its lifeblood, and it gives you back… this. A presence. A consequence made flesh and folklore. When the church fails, and Reverend Ackman in 1905 finds the most godless people he’s ever met, what fills the void? Half-remembered rituals. Corn doll effigies dug up from cultural memory, made by people who don’t even know why they’re making them anymore. It’s a faith born of pure necessity. A desperate, superstitious bargain was struck with the dirt.

You can see Barnett’s own geography in every page. He’s from West Yorkshire, writes for the Guardian, and knows this landscape. It’s not researched. It’s lived-in. The book’s afterword, apparently, makes that clear. This isn’t just a setting he imagined; it’s one he’s absorbed, with all its memorials to mining disasters and surveys for subsidence. That authenticity thrums through the prose. The dialogue doesn’t sound written; it sounds overheard. The descriptions of the pit, the villages, the way the light fails, it’s all got the grit of truth.

And the politics are there, but they’re worn down like a stone in a stream. The 1984 strike isn’t a polemic; it’s a backdrop of shattered pride and profound loss. “Thatcher reigns supreme,” the synopsis says, and that’s enough. The community is broken already. The economic devastation just makes it easier for the older, darker things to resurface. The horror isn’t political; it’s apolitical. It was here before the politics and it’ll be here after. It just finds the cracks in society to seep through.

Back to Joe, our present-day guide. A fifty-something writer, divorced, successful in escaping but a failure in so much else. He thought he knew the story of his father. Thought he was one thing. The narrative peels that back, layer by painful layer, revealing a sacrifice that was both monstrous and heroic. A man who did a terrible thing for his people.

That’s the real heart of the book, maybe. Not Red Clogs, but the human choices made in its shadow. The bravery that looks like brutality. The love that demands a terrible price. Joe’s journey isn’t to fight a monster. It’s to understand a man. To reconcile with the fact that his father’s world, and the awful logic it operated under, was one he fled from but can never truly leave.

The structure shouldn’t work as seamlessly as it does. Five timelines, jumping back and forth? It sounds like a recipe for confusion. But Barnett manages it. The threads weave together not through cheap coincidences, but through the relentless logic of the land itself. A magpie seen in 1945 might be a carrier of souls, a symbol that echoes in 2025.

A decision made in greed in 1865 by Lord Henry Brody, digging for coal and disturbing what sleeps, ripples out into every subsequent generation. It feels less like a plot and more like a fate. Inevitable. The pacing is somehow both deliberate and compulsive. One reviewer said they started it on a Friday evening and, had they gotten it earlier, would have finished it in a day. That feels right. The book has a gravitational pull.

So where does it sit in Barnett’s folk horror triptych? Withered Hill was the experiment. A toe in the water. Some loved it, others, like the reviewer at Horror Tree, didn’t quite take to it, but could see the skill. Scuttler’s Cove was the refinement, where he found his sea legs, or should that be cliff legs?. But Scratch Moss. This is the mastery. The full, confident stride. He’s not just using folk horror tropes; he’s reinvigorating them from the ground up, literally grounding them in the very real, very dark history of English industry. He’s moved away from what everyone else is doing and carved his own path, straight down into the earth.

It’s a devastating book, as the blurbs promise. But not just in a scary way. In a melancholic, profoundly sad way. It’s about the cost of extraction. Of taking from the land without thought. Of valuing profit over people, and how the people, in their resilience, sometimes forge a pact with something worse just to survive. It’s about communities that are sacrificed and what they, in turn, might sacrifice. The final feeling is one of tragic understanding. A light shone into a deep, dark shaft, illuminating everything you didn’t want to see but now can’t forget.

You finish it. And you feel the dirt, that metaphorical dirt, still there. Under your nails. In the creases of your skin. A residue of Scratch Moss. It doesn’t wash off easy. Barnett hasn’t just written a novel; he’s conducted a séance for a whole way of life, and the thing that haunted it. And the echo of Red Clogs, walking somewhere down below, lingers long after you close the cover.

Scratch Moss by David Barnett

‘An agile and compelling storyteller’ Nick Cutter

1865. Coal lies beneath Scratch Moss Hall and Lord Henry Brody is determined to get to it. But something else lurks below, something dark and evil.

1905. Reverend George Ackman has never known such godless people as those of Scratch Moss. But if not God, what do they believe in?

1945. Arthur works for the Coal Commission, visiting privately-owned pits ahead of their nationalisation. On his visit to Scratch Moss, he finds only misery and death.

1985. The miners have lost. Thatcher reigns supreme. And in the shattered community of Scratch Moss, rumours resurface about Red Clogs, a terrible presence in the land below.

2025. Divorced, fifty-something writer Joe returns to his hometown of Scratch Moss for the funeral of his father. Soon the memories of Joe’s teenage years, and the horror that blighted the community, come flooding back

A devastating, five-timeline tale centred on a community first invigorated, then devastated by the coal mining industry in the most original folk horror novel of the year.

Praise for Scratch Moss

‘A creepy folk horror set in an old mining town which moves between generations to slowly build a picture of a town complicit in some terrible things. Really loved this one!’ Sarah Pinborough

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