Folk horror may have had a dramatic resurgence in recent years, but it has always been the backbone of much of our national storytelling. A new anthology of 10 stories set across England, Bog People, brings together some of the most accomplished names in the genre.
In her introduction, editor Hollie Starling describes an ancient ritual in a Devon village: the rich throw heated pennies from their windows, watching those in need burn their fingers. Folk horror by its nature is inherently connected to class and hierarchy. Reverence for tradition is a double-edged sword – or a burning-hot coin.
She also notes the complexity of self-identification as working-class. “For the purposes of this collection,” Starling writes, “contributors were asked to consider if they grew up in circumstances of low social, cultural and economic capital and/or asset wealth, and that regardless of their current circumstances and lifestyle that they could write authentically from that point of view.”
Many of these stories, including those by AK Blakemore, Daniel Draper and Jenn Ashworth, begin with funerals and loss. Draper’s story about an eternal stew, passed around a village from house to house, hob to hob, will haunt my dreams. Every family contributes meat and keeps it bubbling on and on. Some of the stew is eaten by the heads of family on the occasion of a significant death, then it’s returned to its endless progress round the village. I will not spoil the recipe.
In Emma Glass’s Carole, a receipt from Clarks shoe shop stirs echoes of the famous six-word story attributed to Hemingway: “For sale: baby shoes, never worn.” Carole, bereft at the loss of her daughter, walks from a city courthouse to Stonehenge at dawn and then on and on, through a feverish vision of moors and motorways, to Dartmoor, nights and days passing like moments.
The rain stops, the sun shows, another night comes dark and flowing with energy. I don’t sleep; I feel my way through the landscape, the trees that reach and catch my shirt sleeves, holding on to me, saving me from slipping on mossy roots, the unfriendly gorse keeping me at a distance, saying don’t step here, stopping me from tearing my feet on its throne of thorns. Stars alive, alight, I wish you could see them…
Starling’s own story, Yellowbelly, begins with urgent sex between a man and his AI companion. He resets her because she is too working-class, too independent. “I toggle Regional down to 50% for now and look over the other options. My cursor hovers over Independent Expression. Hmm.”
Several authors, in particular Blakemore, who opens the collection, show the world through the eyes of a protagonist whose views embody elitism, class consciousness and bias, the insidious effects of which are passed down the generations. However, the overarching theme of Bog People is sometimes conspicuous by its absence. Class is in the far background. Maybe that’s the point; it is normalised.
Where the collection excels is the winding path it takes through horror, folklore and the gothic; through families, oral history and grief. Many stories are highly stylised, told through interruption, song, signs in churches, receipts or textual irregularity. As Starling observes: “In folk horror the soil beneath our feet is seismically unstable. Our closest kin are unknowable and depraved, bound by unseen influences.” The prose follows suit. Critical information and dialogue is often framed in italics, as if removing it from the normal world of human expression. But human relationships are not always the most important ones here. The writers and their protagonists are in conversation with the past, with the land, with the polarising and sometimes toxic nature of national identity.
Occasionally the prose overbalances, spelling out characters’ intentions and the ramifications of their actions, emptying out subtext as if the authors don’t trust the reader to intuit their purpose. But the collection remains an urgent reminder that this form and genre must be nurtured. In every story certain passages stand out in stark silhouette. There is the chilling simplicity of the line from Ashworth’s The Hanging Stones: “but the candles couldn’t be returned to the box once they’d been lit”. Tom Benn’s It Fair Give Me the Spikes is almost tactile, each word building to a terrible sensory overload:
First light fattened like a dying star and formed the signature of an industrial town already at toil predawn, its factory stacks belching the new day black, the mills dyeing the forked-tongue river sterile inside that Hellmouth north of Halifax where paternal cotton kings had housed their workers in spoked rows of blind back-to-backs quick to tilt and rot.
The title presumably refers to iron age-era human sacrifice, but serves a double metaphorical function, commenting on the enduring nature of inequality. These stories trawl the meaning of life, of death and birth, asking who we were and what we are. They’re about justice and superstition and sorrow, about crawling back from – and towards – the abyss.
• Bog People: A Working-Class Anthology of Folk Horror edited by Hollie Starling is published by Chatto & Windus (£18.99). To support the Guardian, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
