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.

Darke’s Last Show – Jonathan Louis Duckworth

Imagine you’re an Uber driver and your ride is an engaging old guy waxing lyrical about an impossible magic show he’s just performed at a strip club – his last one, he’s just been fired – at which he pulled out all the stops and created a series of illusions that looked truly murderous and astounded the audience.

That’s what we have here – an ancient, powerful magician who goes (comedically) by the name of Devon Darke explaining to his driver what happened to him earlier that evening.

Darke had performed a show at his usual place, but this time pulls out all the stops. Rather than performing mere tricks he goes much, much further. He brings an obnoxious ‘finance bro’ onto the stage and makes him cough up cards, ripping his insides out, until he’s able to clean off the blood and declare ‘is this your card?!’. He saws a couple in half – something which nobody believes, despite the blood, bone and entrails for all to see. And he makes a cop slowly inflate until he bursts.

The audience is sometimes troubled by what they are seeing but on the whole love it, growing bored when he turns to more mundane fillers in between. And by the end of the killer acts, each of the apparently dead people return to the audience smiling and laughing, allowing them all to leave knowing that all is fine.

But is it? Well, the story ends in a way that’s both sweet and macabre, though mostly macabre.

It’s macabre in that Darke asks Raul, the driver, to drop him at an out-of-town retail park, near Toys R Us. Where the four people he performed on in the show are waiting for him, all quite dead. The big illusion, it appears, was when they reappeared in the audience as living people when in fact they had been killed on stage. And far from the performance being Darke’s last show, there’s another one. Darke says ‘I’m done hiding. Starting tonight, the old science of the dark returns.’ And the story ends with him saying ‘the show’s over, now it’s the world turn…’.

But the story has element of the sweet in that Darke clearly likes Raul, gives him his full pay cheque for the evening and, as the story comes to an end, advises Raul to stay indoors and avoid what’s happening outside around him.

 The story is delicious in its style. Duckworth’s writing and descriptions are fantastic. And it’s helped all the more if you listen to the audio version on Pseudopod read by Jon Padgett. Darke’s monologue is delivered in a wry fashion, mocking the people who doubt his abilities, hinting that he has been around for thousands of years (Jesus, he says, was ‘one of the best warlocks to call on the old science’ and points out the irony that by the time Salem came around most of the real magicians were gone), and feigning surprise at the completely intentional actions that he himself does.

It’s similar in its theme to Ligotti’s Drink to me only with Labyrinthine Eyes –  an all-powerful magician forced to perform party tricks, and this culminating in the magician finally snapping and choosing to use their power on the world.

But alongside this it also has a clear social commentary. Darke is appalled by the behaviour of humans today – their unwillingness to be shocked by human suffering, people choosing to film rather than report acts of violence, their short-term attention spans and constant need for something to shock them. He’s seen humankind through the centuries and this, you get the sense, is real low point, which is why he’s perhaps had enough and decided to unleash the darkness he can access and control.

 Listen to the story on Pseudopod here: https://pseudopod.org/2023/10/27/pseudopod-889-darkes-last-show/

The Secret of Ventriloquism – Jon Padgett

This is a remarkable book. A collection of interlinked short stories that surely will stand as a classic of weird fiction and supernatural horror. It has shades of Ligotti and Lovecraft, it’s got a variety of styles and formats, it’s chilling and gripping.

There’s too much to say about this collection to do it justice in one review; I’ll do a quick overview of the book from the perspective of its big underlying theme.

At the heart of this book is the idea that beneath our human reality is a more fundamental force. It’s not clear whether it’s an entity, a form of consciousness, a world, or just a kind of other nature. It’s also not clear whether it’s benign or sinister, though Padgett tends toward the latter. And in keeping with this ambivalence, the supernatural force is hinted at or presented differently in the various stories.

Perhaps the most benign – though still disturbing – depiction is in A Little Delta of Filth, towards the end of the collection, in which a woman discovers a ditch through which she can enter a different reality. She puts her arms in and loses human sensation in them, and finds they gradually mutate into something quite different. But far from being pained or troubled, she feels a kind of delicious ecstasy which draws her back to the ditch desperately, until she chooses to enter the alternate world entirely.

Also ambiguous is Origami Dreams, one of the strongest stories in this book, in which a couple leave their kids and house in Dunnstown for a short holiday, but en route experience a dream-like occurrence. When they return back home their reality has completely shifted; it’s become confused, different in often random ways, changeable and their grasp of time and images is incomplete.

Their neighbourhood doesn’t look the same to begin with, their children are different, but gradually it all shifts, until their kids no longer exist, the wife disappears, and the narrator has no conception of who he is. He finds a note explaining that all this has happened to someone, not realising that he wrote that note years back, it seems, and in fact it’s him it happened to.

Whether there’s some malign force destroying the narrator’s reality, or whether the experience of the alternative reality just has that effect is unknown. But either way the story is deeply disturbing – both its sense of supernatural weirdness and the way it plays on common fears about being distant from what you know and love.

The presence of a more sinister force is stronger in The Infusorium, a hardboiled detective style story in which a cop and her partner Guidry are trying to unravel the mystery of bodies appearing deformed, elongated and skeletal. The evidence pointing to strange occurrences at a disused paper mill which every month omits a horrific thick fog that blights the city. Why precisely it’s happening remains clouded, but whatever it is, is resulting in the death, mutilation and apparent reanimation of people across the town.

And at the most malign end, there is 20 Simple Steps to Ventriloquism, which I’ve reviewed elsewhere. Suffice to say, this presents itself as a manual for becoming a ventriloquist until around step ten at which point you (it’s written, unusually, in the second person) are entreated to see other humans as dummies to control, and ultimately to relinquish your own self to what he calls Greater Ventriloquism, implying that beyond our reality is something entirely other that is pulling the strings.

There’s so much more to say about these and other stories in the collection. Murmurs of a Voice Foreknown, for example, sees a bullied brother enact retribution of a horrific kind that suggests he is himself possessed by something. The Secret of Ventriloquism is written as a stage play in which these two brothers and their dead brother play out a disturbing ventriloquism act onstage. And at the end of the collection, maybe bringing it all together, there’s The Secret Society of Dummies, in which a woman finds that Dunnstown has been overtaken by a creeping, jaundiced, yellowing aura and the town she once knew has all but disappeared.

And across all these are certain events and motifs that bind the stories together. Much of the events take place in Dunnstown, where the main park, the derelict paper mill and the fog appear and reappear. The crash of a plane features in many stories, and refers to Flight 389, a story in which a man describes his perfectly reasonable fear of flying, and ends up dying in a plane crash above Dunnstown that’s caused by pilots who have become hollowed out skeletons, a crash we are led to believe was caused by the Greater Ventriloquist.

And there are dummies, reanimated skeletons, elongated bodies, deformed hands and daddy longlegs, all of which recur throughout the book to create the sense of a rumbling, dark presence constantly pressing through, distorting and slowly devouring everyday human reality.

The Dead Zone – Stephen King

Once again, reading Stephen King I’m struck not so much by the horror as by the astute psychology that drive his writing. 

There is some horror, but it’s a tiny aspect of this big book. Likewise, there’s the supernatural, but its function is to make the plot move forward, and so allow King to do his thing – write a gripping, easy to read novel full of great characters, relationships and conversations.

It’s about Johnny Smith who, after an accident on an ice rink as a kid – an incident which actually nobody really remembers, even him – acquires the ability to read people: when he touches them, sometimes, not always, but sometimes, he knows what they’re thinking, their innermost thoughts, and can even see aspects of their future.

But he doesn’t get time to enjoy it or use it, cause as a young man after a night out at the fair – where he wins big money on a game because he can see the future – he is hit by a car, and enters a coma that lasts years. When he comes out, his gift is stronger than before, a little more controllable. He starts to use it to help people, but then ends up freaking people out, getting backs up, contacted by thousands of people wanting help from him, and it gets messy.

He retreats, keeping his gift to himself. But at the back of hid mind he has his Mum’s voice telling him to use his gift for good. Whilst working as a teacher for the child of a rich industrialist, he averts tens of deaths with his gift. He goes and helps track down a brutal serial killer in a nearby small town. And when he shakes hands with Gregg Stillson, an aspiring politician with a very shady character and background that Johnny sees will be president one day, he vows to assassinate him. The attempt goes wrong, but in the process Stillson ends up revealing his character on a public stage.

It’s a gripping read, like I say, but not so much because of the tension of a fast-unfolding plot, more because of the style. And even more than that, the characters. Johnny himself is truly likeable, and a good hundred or so pages in the first half are about his rehabilitation from the coma, how hard it is to adapt to the life he wakes up in, where his once-girlfriend is now married with children, and his parents’ relationship has collapsed, his Mum becoming a complete religious zealot as a way of coping with his accident and hospitalisation.

And then there’s Stillson, who has made his way into public life through a mix of thuggishness and charisma, using Hells Angels as bodyguards, threatening anyone who gets in his way, and appealing to the basest desires of the voters. Incredibly this book was published in the late 70s – close enough to half a century ago! – but it’s feels intensely contemporary, given the previous occupant of the White House, and the surge of right wing populists elsewhere.

And of course there are all the bit characters – the struggling police chief desperate for help, the conflicted ex-girlfriend, the kid who just needs someone to lift the pressure from his over-achieving Dad… it’s all of this too, that make The Dead Zone a great piece of writing. 

Under the Dome – Stephen King

This epic boxset-like novel features a huge cast of characters and dissects, like little else, the intricacies of small town politics – and the dangers we face as the world’s resources become more limited.

It begins when a mysterious see-through dome descends on the small town of Chester’s Mill, killing birds, animals and humans as it does so, and trapping the town’s population. The US government begins looking into the causes and possible solutions, but it’s clear very quickly that the dome dwellers are on their own.

We meet an array of Chester’s Mill residents. Rennie, a small time politician who sees this as his chance to hold power, finally. He engineers situations – like a food riot at the supermarket – to justify more police and greater police violence, eventually recruiting some of the most horrible twenty-somethings to police the town. It turns out he’s a big time criminal who is brewing crystal meth, and is in fact stealing the dwindling town supplies of propane to keep the meth factory going.

We meet his unstable and ill son, Rennie Jr, who is in the midst of a horrific killing spree, which would have happened regardless of the dome, but whose mental and physical ill health is exacerbated by the the dome.

We meet Barbie, an army veteran cooking in the town diner, who is in fact leaving town when the dome comes down following a run-in with Rennie Jr and his pals. Blocked by the dome, an army official from the outside – Colonel Cox – asks him to lead the town, a suggestion that Rennie does everything in his power to stop.

And we meet Julia, the local paper’s editor who is intent on speaking truth to power, not least to Rennie and his gang of thugs, even as her paper and her life are constantly threatened by Rennie.

From here ensues hundreds of pages about the politics, intrigue and terror of a small town population trapped in a confined space with limited resources and growing despair about being freed, as a small few try to turn the situation to their advantage.

In short bursts of 3 or 4 pages, King takes us through the lives and emotions of probably nearly a hundred people – and it’s truly gripping. You start to connect to loads of them. Andy Sanders who turns from a naive politician to a gun-toting meth addict after his family dies. Sam Bushy who is horrifically raped by the new police recruits and kills plenty of them in return. Rusty, a medical assistant who becomes the town’s surgeon after the only qualified surgeon dies.

And as the story goes on, gradually there are less and less of them – very few in fact. So few that the apparent hero at the start – Barbie – appears far from that by the end, not because he’s turned away from heroic but because events conspire against him and the other good guys almost entirely.

I can’t help feeling that the final 100 or so pages, where King tries to bring a supernatural explanation and finale to the dome, are a bit of a let down. It’s the townspeople, their relationships, the insight into how terrified and cornered people behave, that are so mesmerising. You can’t help making the jump from this story to the impact of climate change, and thinking it does not bode well for us.

“At first nothing crossed his mind. He was in that mostly empty-headed state of grace which is sometimes fertile soil: it’s the ground from which our brightest dreams and biggest ideas (both the good and the spectacularly bad) suddenly burst forth, often full-blown. Yet there is always a chain of association.”

Stephen King, Under the Dome