The Folk Horror Chain is a framework devised by writer and film-maker Adam Scovell in his essential study of the genre, Folk Horror: Hours Dreadful and Things Strange. For Scovell, Folk Horror can - among other things - be categorised as "a work that uses folklore…to imbue itself with a sense of the arcane for … Continue reading The Folk Horror Chain in Clive Barker’s “Books of Blood”
Welcome to the first in an occasional series of retrospective looks at 80s & early 90s horror. There are, I know, loads of excellent websites covering this area. Will Errickson's Too Much Horror Fiction is the Daddy, and of course Grady Hendrix's essential Paperbacks from Hell is your print companion. Elsewhere in the Gyre I've … Continue reading Horror Rewind #1 – Mark Morris’s “Toady” (1989)
Is The Droving Folk Horror? I was asking myself this more and more the longer this (admittedly short¹) film went on. It certainly uses some familiar tropes: an outsider comes to a "remote" location; there are people wearing animal masks, and there are rumours of magic & ritual. Some moderate spoilers follow. Martin (a superb, … Continue reading …but is it Folk Horror? “The Droving” (2020)
I recently reviewed Dan Coxon's great little horror micro-anthology from Black Shuck books, Green Fingers. Impressed, I took a punt on another from their "Shadows" series. There are 21 at time of writing, but there's little information on their website to allow you to choose one over another, other than cover art (their jacket design … Continue reading Review – “Winter Freits” by Andrew David Barker (2019)
This short, sharp "micro-collection" is a wee gem. Author Dan Coxon is a name familiar to regular visitors to the Gyre, as the editor of the ever-reliable Tales From the Shadow Booth collections (volumes 3 and 4 reviewed), and the excellent This Dreaming Isle anthology of weird landscape fiction. The horticulturally-themed Green Fingers is number … Continue reading Review: “Green Fingers” by Dan Coxon
I write about a variety of themes on this blog, and though I have a deep love of music I try to avoid writing about it because that's not what the Gyre is about. I've made a few exceptions before but this piece almost fits with the site's other interests. For over twenty years I've … Continue reading Drexciya v Cthulhu
Imagine "The Littlest Hobo" written by Ted Hughes... Marney the Fox was a two-page b&w comic strip featured in Buster from 1974-1976. It's been collated and nicely reprinted by Rebellion comics, who did a similarly good job on The Beatles Story (and other lost UK comic serials). Marney is a fox cub, orphaned in the … Continue reading Rural horror for kids! – “Marney the Fox”
"At last, the night has a hero" - Cabal strapline. I've written elsewhere about the anticipation my friends and I felt in the months before the release of Clive Barker's second feature film Nightbreed in the autumn of 1990. Not that we got to see it: an unimpressive box-office in America meant it only got … Continue reading At last…Clive Barker’s ‘Nightbreed’ (1990/2014)
Just 6 months after the superb volume 3 of Tales from the Shadow Booth (which I reviewed here), "the international journal of weird and eerie fiction", Dan Coxon brings us another. And its just as good: that's all you really need to know. But if you want more, read on... It begins, as all trips … Continue reading Review: “Tales from the Shadow Booth: Volume 4”
Bernard Rose's 1992 film horror Candyman was adapted by him from Clive Barker's 1985 short story "The Forbidden", published in volume 5 of the groundbreaking Books of Blood. Candyman transports the action from Barker's Liverpool to Chicago, specifically to the "projects" (US term for "housing scheme") of Cabrini-Green. In addition to the source material's look … Continue reading Clive Barker: “Candyman”, “The Forbidden”, Place, Race & Time
Into the Gyre 