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These eight creepy yarns are a somewhat mixed bag, though gorgeously presented.
I have to admit that I bought The Haunting Season mainly on the strength of its enticing cover, with its gold detailing and sprayed blue edges (always a sucker for those…). I know, don’t judge a book blah blah. But I was also reeled in by the list of interesting modern authors who’d contributed to this slim volume, all of whom I’d encountered before and liked, particularly Laura Purcell, Andrew Michael Hurley and Imogen Hermes Gowar. The book suffers from a bit of quality fluctuation, that perennial problem of the anthology, but overall I enjoyed the experience.
First up is ‘A Study in Black and White’ by Bridget Collins, author of The Binding. This is a solid opener, with a young man agreeing to rent an eye-catchingly monochrome chess-themed house despite the locals seeming frightened of it (red flag surely?), and then being snowed in and having a tough time. Quite creepy but the characterisation could have done with a bit more breathing space. 7/10.
Next is ‘Thwaite’s Tenant’ by Imogen Hermes Gowar, author of The Mermaid and Mrs Hancock. This is one of the stronger tales, another haunted house story about a woman who flees her abusive husband and is then stashed away at her father’s secret-infidelity-safehouse where he used to keep his mistresses. She then also has a tough time. The writing in this one is pretty raw and visceral, it has contemporary resonances, and a satisfying ending. 8/10.
The third story, ‘The Eel Singers’ by Natasha Pulley, is maybe the one that worked the least well for me, but that’s largely because it uses characters from her popular novel The Watchmaker of Filigree Street, which I haven’t read. Pulley’s register is usually one of vivid whimsy, but in this format that idiosyncrasy doesn’t fully land without prior knowledge of the protagonists and their world. It tells of three characters, two men and a younger girl, who travel to the Fens in order to give one of the guys a break from his relentlessly exhausting clairvoyance (!), since apparently the Fens are somehow free of psychic energies (?), and there they encounter weird denizens of the marshes. Well-written but too quirky for me in this instance. 5/10.
Then there’s ‘Lily Wilt’ by Jess Kidd, author of Things in Jars and The Hoarder. This one has a slight Poe-esque flavour, and features a young photographer hired to photograph the corpse of a recently deceased and very beautiful young girl, the titular Lily Wilt, before her funeral. It’s a story of obsession and madness and goes to some pretty odd places. I quite liked its tone overall but some of the plot details are a bit unclear and I didn’t quite get a handle on the motivations. 6/10.
Story number five is ‘The Chillingham Chair’ by Laura Purcell, who I’m a particular fan of so I was pleased to find it to be one of my favourites in the book. It’s about a woman who falls from a horse and is then confined to a wheelchair previously owned by her new brother-in-law’s father. The chair seems to be possessed by the restless spirit of the old man, who appears to have a particular agenda in mind. As I’d expect from Purcell it’s a good level of creepy, with a strong story and some effective reveals. 8/10.
The next story, ‘The Hanging of the Greens’ by Andrew Michael Hurley, is the standout for me. The only story to be set in the modern day, it has the classic Hurley-esque preoccupation with the intersection between fervent Christianity and dark ancient folkloric ritual. It doesn’t go where I expected it to, and is genuinely unnerving to the point where I was a bit reluctant to walk around my house in the dark. Hurley is so good at creating an uneasy atmosphere and this story shows he can do it even with fewer than forty pages to work with. 9/10.
Kiran Millwood Hargrave provides the penultimate story, ‘Confinement’, which reminds me somewhat of the classic short story ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’ in that it tells of a woman locked into a room after giving birth and suffering a dramatic degeneration in her mental health. She also believes she’s being haunted by the malign spirit of a local baby-killing witch. It’s rather nasty and upsetting, well-written and spooky. Solid. 7/10.
The final story is ‘Monster’ by Elizabeth Macneal, author of The Doll Factory. Bit forgettable, this one. It’s about a vile man obsessed with idea of finding a prehistoric fossil buried within the cliffs of a seaside town, and pursues that goal to the detriment of all those around him. This doesn’t feel like a ghost story or a horror story exactly so much as a dark fable, and it doesn’t really do anything unexpected plot-wise, though it is, like every story here, well-written. 6/10.
I certainly recommend this book to any fan of the genre or of any of the featured authors. It did occur to me that it’s a bit odd that seven out of the eight were set in the Victorian or Edwardian era, which some could find repetitive – not me though, the more Victoriana the better! The three that I was most looking forward to, the second, fifth and sixth stories, were in fact the ones that I ended up enjoying the most, but different stories will appeal to different people of course. And it does look lovely on the bookshelf…
Edition:
Sphere | 2022 | 304p | Paperback | Buy here