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.
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.
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.
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.”
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.
