Cunning Folk – Adam Nevill

Somehow this was my first Adam Nevill read – I’m not sure how I’d not read any of his fiction before, but I loved the deep characterisation, how much you feel for them, and reel from some of the horrific situations they find themselves in.

The beauty of this novel is in many respect its simplicity. There are just six characters and one storyline. A young family – Tom, his wife Fiona and their young daughter Gracey – move from the city into their first house, a fixer-upper in rural England. Led by Tom’s enthusiasm for living an idealised rural life, they are there to do up the house and create a different kind of life for themselves, one without the crime of the city, one where they can enjoy an outdoor life, and Gracey can play freely in the woods next to their new house.

What they don’t know is that all the people who have previously lived in this house have met a tragic end – suicide, murder and madness. And the reason: the neighbours. Medea and Magi are an elderly couple next door who from the off appear to be unreasonably and aggressively intolerant of them, their new neighbours, and have some mysterious power over people in the village.

Tom is almost immediately wound-up by their perfect garden and superior attitude, and the arguments between them begin straight-away. Fiona pleads with Tom to put his energy into the house or finding freelance work, but he is driven by the overriding sense that the neighbours are making their life unnecessarily difficult.

Gradually, over the first 150 page or so, Tom – and us, the readers – discover that in fact he is right to be suspicious: they are practicing dark arts in order to maintain power. With the help of Blackwood, an occultist, and against the preferences of Fiona, Tom comes to see that they have filled their house with curses that affect them in various ways. Gracey ventures into the woodland to see them performing a ritual. Their little dog Archie dies of a mysterious illness. The relationship between Tom and Fiona all but disappears.

And then in a shocking, stomach-churning scene, something terrible happens to Gracey. Rather than reacting as Fiona would once have expected, Tom knows it’s a result of the dark magic these malicious neighbours have been practicing from the start, and Blackwood advises that unless the curse is reversed Gracey will never be better. So at that moment he leaves Fiona at the hospital with Gracey and goes to end things once and for all with his neighbours.

This is such a strong novel: far more than a piece of folk horror genre writing, not that there’d be anything wrong with that if that’s what it were.

First of all, there’s the quality and complexity of the language. Throughout the book Neville has powerful description of both the everyday nature of a decrepit house, and the fantastical scenes, rituals and rites that Tom and Gracey both witness on various occasions. The language really elevates this piece of horror.

Secondly there’s the build-up. I’d read a couple of short reviews on Good Reads that Cunning Folk takes a while to get going, and that the book is split into two halves, with the first focussed on the house and family, the second moving into horror.

Actually there’s A LOT going on in the first half – drawing the characters, building our empathy with them, ratcheting up the tension between the neighbours, sowing discord between Tom and Fiona, despatching the dog, creating the mystery. Not only would the second half have been far less effective without all the work done in the first but in fact I’d say the first half is the most engaging part of the novel.

And finally Cunning Folk can be read as a commentary on masculinity and fatherhood. It’s Tom who persuades his wife to make the move to the countryside, who is committed to creating an idyllic family life for Fiona and Gracey. And it’s Tom who sees all the problems with the neighbours and feels he needs to protect his family. In other words, Tom feels responsible for everything that befalls his family, and is so driven to understand it, and bring it to an end, that it drives him half mad and rips their marriage apart.

Of course, in the novel, much of what happens is in fact not his fault at all; it’s the result of maniacal neighbours. But the point remains: he feels the responsibility to create a better life for his family, and to protect them, and in the end he and they pay a very high cost indeed. 

Devil’s Day – Andrew Michael Hurley

Like Hurley’s other works, Devil’s Day is a powerful blend of folk horror and northern place writing that draws you in through the uncomfortable atmosphere.

The plot itself is both simple and deep. It’s simple insofar as it’s the story of Johnny (told in the first person) returning to the remote farming hamlet where he grew up on the border of Yorkshire and Lancashire, bringing with him his pregnant wife Kat. They are visiting from the east of England where they now live after the death of his grandfather known as the Gaffer.

The depth comes in a few ways. At the novel’s heart is a portrayal of northern farming life as bleak and hard, a constant battle against the forces of nature – the wind, the snow, the rain, the unpredictable seasons, the nearness of death – which make creating a livelihood on the hills almost impossible. Yet it also attracts people,  draws them in, it gets in a person’s blood because the land is fundamental to what it is to be human. It’s a fantastic refusal to the image of the popular rural idyll.

And alongside this is the toughness of the people who live there; battle-hardened after so many years eking a living from this recalcitrant land. Johnny’s own family are dwindling, worn-out and often unwelcoming to Kat, seeing her as an outsider unaccustomed and unprepared for the work needed on the farm. And the others in the farms and houses nearby are the same or worse: insular, wild people who are just struggling to get by. And the Gaffer is a presence throughout, a strong often mean character known for drinking, womanising and gambling across the valley.

They have secrets, these people, not least about a young lad who came to the valley looking to steal from them, which led to a horrific event and the loss of the kid’s life – something hidden by them all, and which appals Kat’s sensitives. They think she’s soft, she doesn’t know what it’s like up here in the north, but the narrator, Johnny, implies she will and does learn to accept it.

And alongside the hardness of both nature and the locals, there’s also a sense of the supernatural, and specifically the idea that up here the devil jumps between people and animals, causing mischief and then moving on so as to avoid capture. We hear tales from Johnny’s youth about the devil’s presence at an accident that resulted in the death of a child, and we meet Grace, a young girl who befriends Kat, but is occasionally prone to violence and in a chilling scene talks as if she can not only read Kat’s mind but knows things she couldn’t possibly know.

Like Hurley’s other books – Starve Acr especially, but also The Loney – Devil’s Day carries the hallmarks of folk horror: the unwelcome outsider shocked by rural way of life, the forces of nature constantly at the door, and hints of a supernatural presence that dwells in the valley. Also like his other books, the horror and the supernatural are relatively under-played, and in that sense is a great example of what David Barnett has called Folk Realism…

“These books of Folk Realism aren’t interested in tidy endings or lengthy justifications. Like the vagaries of the landscape or, indeed, the weather, they are what they are. They are bewitching and magical, disturbing and horrifying, and help us tether our transitory modern lives to the bedrock of all that has gone before.”

And indeed, there’s a sense throughout the novel that something is coming – and in particular that Kat or her unborn baby might be harmed, whether by nature, by the people or by the supernatural. And yet by the end of the book we don’t have a sense of where the real danger lies, or if there even is one.

The Twelve Strange Days of Christmas – Syd Moore

A collection of stories that are presented as something like cosy horror but span a lot more – and are lot more interesting – horror than the book’s title appears.

As you’d expect, the book contains twelve stories. Many are written in the style of late nineteenth or early twentieth century ghost stories, like MR James, and you get the sense that this is what the publisher is trying to do with the book. 

It begins with a quintessentially Jamesian story, ‘Septimus and the Shaman’, in which a young man sits down with his mentor and teacher, Septimus Strange, who recounts an odd tale from his younger days as an academic when he found himself involved in a shamanic ritual that resulted in him appearing to see supernatural entities or visions.

But there’s a much wider variety of story than this in Moore’s collection. For me, two really stood out.

‘She Saw Three Ships’ is a lovely piece of folk horror writing. A woman travels to a cottage she’s booked for her family in a beautiful fishing village, arriving early to get it ready for when her husband and child get there the following day. It’s a gorgeous place but immediately the local people warn her to be careful, tell her she shouldn’t be there.

As she’s cleaning, she sees a boat arrive at the harbour, an old-fashioned boat. It’s met by the locals. Rather than welcoming them, though, the disembarking sailors are met with violence as the locals proceed to slaughter them. A further boat arrives and a horrific battle ensues on the beach and even up to her holiday cottage; she survives, it seems, only by hiding in a tiny priest’s hole under the stairs.

The next day it’s as if nothing has happened – the ships are gone, there are no dead, all is well. It is, it transpires, an annual supernatural ritual she has stumbled across.

‘Barefoot through the snow’ is a ghost story that leaves you sad and surprised. Told in the first person, a woman is walking in a white dress, barefoot through the wintery countryside to return home and find her two children. She’d been in prison but now finds herself out, no longer dressed in prison rags. She walks, ruminates on the past and what she sees now, how things are so dramatically changed on the way to her village – and on how she longs to see and hold her beloved children.

Only at the end is it revealed that the she is in fact dead, a ghost; she has died and is walking through a world in which she no belongs. 

Starve Acre – Andrew Michael Hurley

This is a read-in-one-sitting book – short, gripping, claustrophobic, it keeps you turning until the very end.

It’s the story of Juliette and Richard, a young couple who move to an old family home, Starve Acre, in a small village in the Yorkshire Dales. They raise their son Ewan there, but sadly he dies at the age of 5.

In many ways this is a study of grief, how it affects the two of them in different ways. Richard throws himself into excavating the barren field across the road from their house, trying to uncover an ancient oak tree that folk history says was there and used for hangings hundreds of years back – a use that has led, it is said, to the field being barren.

Juliette meanwhile is struggling to get over Ewan’s death, still sleeps in their son’s room, and is convinced she can feel his presence. She invites their friend Gordon and an older woman known for her connection to the supernatural, Mrs Forde, over for what seems to be a seance, where Juliette discovers something that suddenly gives her hope, but that Richard can’t understand.

The only other character in the story of significance is Harrie, Juliette’s sister, who arrives and stays at Starve Acre with the intention of bullying her sister into getting on with her life and overcoming her son’s death.

** Spoiler alerts coming ** We learn gradually that Ewan was a troubled child even at 4, sometimes excessively violent, once going missing in the night, and although it’s never fully explained there are hints it’s connected to the barren field opposite their house where he sometimes plays. In particular, it seems to have led him to being directed by an invisible friend or possibly supernatural being known in local folklore as Jack Grey.

And things begin to escalate when Richard finds the bones of a hare which he takes home. The hare mysteriously regenerates, becoming a living creature that keeps on coming back to the house, eventually being taken on by Juliette as a disturbing and thoroughly inappropriate replacement child.

It’s a great story, brilliantly written. It plays with the relationship between grief and fantasy, with Juliette seeming to grasp for supernatural explanations for the death of Ewan. But there’s more to it than that – the hare, the tree, the voices Ewan heard, perhaps even his death, all are weird occurrences that can’t be explained away by a psychological disorder. So we’re left wondering what’s going on here, grief yes, but something else, something inexplicable too. History, folklore, death coming back to haunt us.

The Loney – Andrew Hurley

Horror, and folk horror in particular, often falls into one of two camps. Sometimes there appear to be something supernatural going on but as the story progresses it turns out that actually it’s just humans doing strange things but attributing supernatural explanations. And sometimes there appear to be odd things going on, and it transpires that in fact it’s not just humans being strange but there’s in fact something supernatural lurking behind it all.

*Spoiler alert* The Loney falls into the latter camp. The story centres on a devout Catholic family searching for a religious intervention to cure their dumb son Hanny. As the story progresses you can’t help feeling that they are grasping at straws, desperate for something that will never happen… there are visits to a shrine, the constant prayers and rituals, the immense expectations placed on their priests. And then, in the end, there is a supernatural intervention, though not the kind they’d want, where Hanny is cured.

The Loney is told through the eyes of Smith a teenager in a devoutly Catholic family, who is narrating their stay at the Moorings, a house on the edge of a remote estuary in Lancashire they call The Loney, which they visit each year at Easter in order to carry out a religious ritual that they hope will result in their other son, Hanny, being cured of his inability to speak.

It’s a strange mix of people who are there: Smith, Hanny and their passive Farther and intensely religious Mummer; there’s Mr and Mrs Belderboss, Miss Bunce, and the new priest in their London area, Father Bernard, who has replaced Father Wilfred (the previous priest, Mr Belderboss’s brother and Miss Bunce’s boss) who recently died in slightly mysterious, or at least unknown, circumstances.

There are a few story lines going on – around Father Wilfred’s death, and the community’s willingness to accept father Bernard, in particular, but the core of it is about the determination to see Hanny healed.

When they arrive, Smith and Hanny run into a strange group of locals – A spiv-like Leonard who is looking after a young pregnant girl called Else, plus a couple of viscious lads, Parkinson and Collier, and an older man who seems to be under their power, Clement. They have some difficult run-ins with the group. Early on in the journey to the Moorings Leonard helps them fix the car, which is where they first meet. Hanny and Smith keep encountering them, and Hanny develops a strange infatuation with the young pregnant girl, seeming to see the baby as his own. And there’s a great scene where this group visit Smith’s family at the Moorings and perform the pace egg performance in their front room, a raucous, drunken and violent show that the family are desperate but powerless to stop.

The story builds up until we find that the monstrous Leonard, Parkinson and Collier are using the baby to perform some kind of rituals themselves, and in the end something happens in a cellar to Hanny, with the help of Leonard, Collier and Parkinson, that results in Hanny being changed, or cured.

and it’s hard to see absolute differences between the two. In particular, in the figure of the devout and desperate Mummer, who’d give almost anything for Hanny to speak, who forces him to undertake grim rituals and acts in order to get God’s help, you wonder what she would make of that final ritual in which a baby is sacrificed for her son’s speech: she wouldn’t say she’d approve of course, but if it cured her son then, well, maybe she would?

Water shall refuse them – Lucie McKnight Hardy

This is an intriguing and suspenseful read, a dark coming of age story that toys with the traditions of folk horror.

It centres on young teenager, Nif, and her family who have moved out of the city to a small village in Wales after the death of Nif’s four year old sister, Petra, who drowned in the bath when her Mum went to answer the phone.

The Mum is in a state of shock and withdrawal from the world, the Dad struggling to keep his family happy, and Nif is left looking after Lorry, Petra’s twin brother.

The local people are hostile and even violent towards them as outsiders, and she quickly sees strange goings on among the churchgoers.

But the core of the story is Nif’s relationship with another outsider, Mally and his often drunk Mum. She gradually reveals the strange beliefs she’s developed since Petra’s death  – the Creed – which requires her to collect skulls and bird parts, and to cancel out an ill-doing with another.

Mally and Nif become closer, striking up a physical relationship and bonding over their outsider status and sense of the macabre and stories of Mally’s ancestors who were accused of bringing the plague to the village – and surviving it because they were witches.

Mally’s Mum, Janet, meanwhile is coming on to Nif’s Dad and treating her Mum with herbs and potions reminiscent of witchcraft.

Throughout, Nif is trying to remember something suppressed within her, something that will allow her to recollect why Petra drowned – why her Mum let her drown – and as the story rolls on her awareness, like her relationship with Mally, gradually gets darker until there’s a final revelation.

In the end this is an intriguing mix. There are strong hints at witchcraft, mysterious coincidences and the supernatural, and the themes of folk horror – isolation, rural and a hostile community – are constant. But actually the supernatural remains beyond reach and it’s the violence of real life and family and young adulthood that is the real horror here.