Also interesting seeing past centuries' perception of Halloween, and some folklore/practices I was not aware of such as sin eating. The Withered Arm was also a very interesting story, with almost a time travel/sensing the future paradox of the two main characters harming each other unintentionally, in ways that depend on the actions of the other.

She looked on the country as something excellent and wholesome in its way, which was apt to become troublesome if you encouraged it overmuch. The fact that it took me literally weeks to finally finish this thing should tell you everything you need to know.Every story is accompanied with its own linocut by Richard Wells add something really special as well. E. Nesbit's 'Man-Size in Marble' seems to be in every anthology I read, but no wonder - it's a classic piece, and I find the ending even more alarming now than when I was first scared by it aged nine. But even if some are repetetive, it's usually easy to see why they were included, and this is a perfect gift for anyone who enjoys horror or dark fantasy. I went in with such high expectations; I saw it on the shelf in Waterstones (yes brought new which makes it even more disappointing) and did a wee happy jiggy dance. Lots of the stories were completely new to me, which is great: a personal favourite now has to be Man-Size in Marble by Edith Nesbit, a ferociously economical, chilling little tale of history intruding upon newcomers who don't know how to play by the rules.

Outside of his television work, he makes and sells his own darkly folkloric artwork, often lino cut and printed by hand (slipperyjack. Shirley Jackson’s ‘The Summer People’ built up some great tension, but then stopped abruptly, so it just felt like an unfinished project. Folk horror' has become a very popular term in recent years particularly, with a lot written about the term. He has delivered talks on these subjects at numerous events and symposiums including at Cambridge University and the British Museum in London. By this I mean it is not likely that these stories are already in an anthology you already have in your collection, which is a problem I usually have, especially with vampire stories.To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. It has the feel of a genuine folk narrative, and shows that Le Fanu wasn't finished after 'In a Glass Darkly'. This is a book that demands to be read aloud--perhaps on a darkening winter evening before a roaring fire. It is little wonder then that so many of us retreat into those fears we at least partially recognise, and willingly submit to. These stories are great for horror beginners, as they tend toward the restrained and distanced horror, instead of the gore and shock of more modern horror.

R. James, Shirley Jackson and Algernon Blackwood, alongside eerie tales by those less associated with the horror genre, like John Buchan, E. EXCEPT for the story where they kill a child and sow it’s ground up bones into the soil to provide a good harvest.Others seemed to recognise the inherent uneasyness of some landscapes and that feeling, creeping up on you through the autumn mist, and that's what I'm really chasing when I turn to folk horror. There's a bit of everything in here from great demonic figures, to ominous brooding buildings, to strange and twisted village rituals.

Overall a disappointing collection, just because something is set in the wilderness and maybe has a wee bit of devil worship (hail Satan) does not make it Folk Horror. A s soon as I heard the initial musings of a book of classic folk horror short stories selected and illustrated by Richard Wells, my curiosity was piqued on several levels. This shows how the sub-genre or mode of folk horror developed over nearly a century: a development that is more stylistic than subject-wise, for the most part. I think the concept of the 'intruder meddling' which is so key to this subset of the genre is such an interesting one, and to me this is certainly able to be paralleled with colonialism and a fear/disgust of non-dominant cultural practices by the coloniser reflected in the stories. I loved how set in the natural world and British countryside these were; this feels like genuine British folklore and storytelling culture which reminds me of discourse of how this has been lost over the years where a simply 'dominant' (i.

They stalk the moors at night, the deep forests, cornered fields and dusky churchyards, the narrow lanes and old ways of these ancient places, drawing upon the haunted landscapes of folk-horror – a now widely used term first applied to a series of British films from the late 1960s and 1970s: Witchfinder General (1968), Blood on Satan’s Claw (1971), and The Wicker Man (1973).