A widower and his young daughter live in a hillside cottage. Interspersed between the increasingly dark events of their life are vignettes of historical scenes from the area's past: moments of violence, trauma, and death, whose actors and events feed into each chapter. The girl, Nia, has a powerful imagination, which seems capable of dissolving … Continue reading Review: “Dark Play” by Tim Cooke (2024)
"Politically the UK was still in turmoil, economically the country was very much in the doldrums, and culturally we were still living in the sixties, albeit without any of the verve, and certainly none of the optimism...power cuts and the three-day week...endless public sector strikes, IRA bombings and apparent industrial collapse...it wasn't exactly a dystopian … Continue reading Horror Rewind special: James Herbert! (part one)
Time is cyclical. That's the underlying message of Gareth E. Rees's timely and often persuasive new book, the follow-up to his superb Unofficial Britain. As a species, argues Rees, we've been here before: we've seen the seas rise, seen rising waters swallow the land. It's happened once, twice, many times; and if we take the … Continue reading Review: “Sunken Lands” by Gareth E. Rees (2024)
Copy supplied for review Helen Grant's previous book Too Near The Dead was a thoroughly absorbing ghost story, and well worth a read. Her new novel Jump Cut is, I'm pleased to say, even better. Writer Theda Garrick is fortunate enough to have succeeded where others appear to have failed, and gained access to elderly … Continue reading Review: ‘Jump Cut’ by Helen Grant (2023)
Stephen King famously wrote in Danse Macabre, his 1981 study of the horror genre, "I recognize terror as the finest emotion and so I will try to terrorize the reader. But if I find that I cannot terrify, I will try to horrify, and if I find that I cannot horrify, I'll go for the … Continue reading Horror Rewind #9 – ‘Spawn’ by Shaun Hutson (1983)
Books last. Okay, some books last. Some books are hailed upon publication and instantly attain 'classic' status; the reputation of others grows only slowly; still others appear and just as quickly vanish. Reputations, too. In the 'Horror Rewind' series I've looked at a selection of horror fiction from the 70s and 80s to examine how … Continue reading Horror rewind #7 – ‘Skeleton Crew’ magazine, July 1990
This review first appeared in Horrified magazine in 2021. Cavan Scott & Corin M. Howell’s addictive new horror/crime comic Shadow Service – featuring a detective with magical powers in the murky underworld of London – invites obvious comparisons with Ben Aaronovitch’s enjoyable Rivers of London series, and is, therefore, a welcome addition to a tradition … Continue reading Review: “Shadow Service” by Cavan Scott and Corin M. Howell
This review first appeared in Horrified magazine in 2021. The Folk Horror Chain was developed by writer and film-maker Adam Scovell in his essential guide to the sub-genre, Folk Horror: Hours Dreadful and Things Strange (2017). The chain consists of four ‘links’ which can be used (amongst other things) to help define a cultural artefact … Continue reading Review: “Harvest” by Julian Payne and Zoe Elkins
This review first appeared in Horrified magazine in 2022. Of the world’s ’empty spaces’, the polar regions have a long and distinguished place in horror fiction. From The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym (Edgar Allen Poe, 1838) to At The Mountains of Madness (HP Lovecraft, 1936), and from the TV drama The Terror (AMC, David … Continue reading Review: “All The White Spaces” by Ally Wilkes
This review first appeared in Horrified in 2021 The British Library’s Tales of the Weird series continues its commendable mission to unearth long-obscured writers of the strange from the past hundred and fifty years or so. This latest offering introduced me to a writer whose name I vaguely knew but whose work I had never … Continue reading Review: “I Am Stone: The Gothic Weird Tales of R. Murray Gilchrist”
Into the Gyre 