Dean Koontz is a first-class storyteller. I have fond memories of squirrelling under the covers in my childhood bedroom with his horror novels, worried my mother would deem them too adult, or some other protest prefixed with “too” that would see me denied his riches. Revisiting Koontz now had no less of a thrill.
“And so the first thing my twin sister and I did, when we finally got access to a camera of our own, was fake a ghost photograph.” Maclean opens The Apparition Phase with Abigail and Tim – two precocious and insular siblings trapped in 1970s suburbia, obsessed with all things creepy and unexplained – faking an apparition and showing the resulting picture to a vulnerable schoolmate.
Back in 2008, Comma Press created a cult hit with their anthology The New Uncanny, which invited authors to write stories in response to Sigmund Freud’s theory of the uncanny or unheimlich. The collection won that year’s Shirley Jackson Anthology Award and even spawned a film, Matthew Holness’s modern British horror classic Possum. 12 years later comes The New Abject. As co-editor Ra Page’s introduction puts it, “The horror, disgust or recoil we experience when we are faced with what we have shed, let go, expelled, sloughed off – that is the fear of the abject.”
Following the Machen-inspired The Twisted Ones, T. Kingfisher takes on another classic of weird fiction by presenting a hole in the wall of a Curiosity Museum which leads to the “region of singular loneliness and desolation” described in Algernon Blackwood’s 1907 The Willows. It’s an incredibly engaging idea, and the book powers along with a likeable narrator, a well-sketched supporting cast, and the author’s clear delight in genre. If you’ve ever wondered how Blackwood would meld with a pacey plot, a touch of Buffy, another of House of Leaves, another of Annihilation – then this is one for you.
Our introduction to the tenebrous, haunted streets of London Incognita is the Shirley Jackson Award-nominated “Judderman”. Set in 1972, it sees two brothers, Gary and Daniel Eider, explore the city’s dark corners and “thin places” as they attempt to catalogue its hidden stories, those that belong to the forgotten, dispossessed and abused.
Most horror fans instantly recognise “Weird Tales” as the pulp magazine that jump-started the career of H.P. Lovecraft, Ray Bradbury and other popular horror writers in the early 20th century. However, one detail that appears to be consistently omitted from the magazine’s history is the frequent contributions of women writers who were also some of its most popular contributors.
Ghost stories are often not about ghosts at all – they are about people. And so goes Edward Parnell’s Ghostland, a deeply personal and quietly magnificent reflection on what it is to be human, through a genre-blending mix of memoir and narrative non-fiction.
The Night Will Find Us by Matthew Lyons wastes no time in taking us into the woods, and fans of supernaturally active forests – from Adam Nevill’s rural Sweden in The Ritual to the Burkittsville woods of the Blair Witch Project – will find much to enjoy in its deftly-conjured location. But the novel’s bold and satisfying blend of folk and cosmic horror put me in mind of Gemma Amor’s masterful White Pines, and this comparison only grew stronger as the novel continued, demonstrating its deep preoccupation with grief and loss.
Maryse Boudreaux knows all about monsters. White supremacists terrorise the streets from under their hoods and, in P. Djèlí Clark’s historical horror novella, also manifest as carnivorous demons. It’s Maryse’s job to hunt them down.
In his introduction to this anthology editor James Machin suggests that works of British weird fiction can be distinguished from their perhaps more well-known American variants due to their “refusal to fully reveal their horrors, relying on ominous hints, telling detail and atmosphere, instead of the full reveal”. It’s an interesting position to offer and one, I admit, I can easily agree with.