Fear Across the Mersey XII: Mackintosh Willy | review by Rafe McGregor

Fear Across the Mersey by Ramsey Campbell

PS Publishing, hardback, £25.00, August 2024, ISBN 9781803943701

 

‘Mackintosh Willy’ concludes the first half of the collection and is, unfortunately, one of the weakest thus far. As I’ve come to expect from Campbell by now, the eponymous individual is not what he seems, neither a flasher nor even a character with a speaking part. The tale is narrated in the first person by a ten-year-old boy who lives near Newsham Park, north-east of the city centre. I have no idea if Campbell grew up there himself, but the narrative sometimes reads as a fascinating and in places even touching memoir of lost youth. As horror fiction, however, it never finds its rhythm: a mystery is set up, solved immediately; the supernatural makes an initially brief and unconvincing appearance; and the resolution fails to follow from complication and exposition. If some of the content is autobiographical, then I think it would have been better put to use as literary rather than genre fiction.

It's a Wonderful Knife: Christmas Dundee | review by Stephen Theaker

December 2024, and Paul Hogan, star of the Crocodile Dundee trilogy (yes, there was a third one), is despondent, grumpy and lonely. And that's even before his extremely aggressive agent phones to say that Burt, his crocodile co-star, has died, and Hogan is expected to attend the funeral. He starts to wish he had never been born.

Meanwhile, in some kind of animal heaven, the animal actors who played Lassie, Jaws and Babe see what's going on and feel the need to intervene. So Burt the crocodile is returned to Earth in flamboyant human form, to take Paul Hogan back in time, to see how different the world would have been without him.

In this alternate reality, Crocodile Dundee starred Arnold Schwarzenegger instead. The film flopped so hard it ruined Linda Kozlowski's career – we hear her (as played by Thea Jo Wolfe) sing about her misery – and worse that that, it led to all-out war between Australia and Austria, as we learn when Burt (Oliver Cartwright) takes Hogan to the devastated future.

This fantastical musical was performed in a small theatre with a great deal of enthusiasm by a lively cast, who navigated a multilevel stage very well, especially during the song and dance numbers – the highlight of which was a eurodance number whose chorus was Schwarzenegger's shout from Predator: "Get to the chopper!"

It might be the simplicity of that song that made it work so well. The lyrics of other songs were difficult to make out, except in quieter numbers, and I wondered whether it might have been better performed without the help of amplification, in such a small venue. But then they were more traditional musical-style songs anyway, and I'm not really a fan of that genre.

The show had a few other problems for me. For one thing, the premise makes no sense. If Arnold Schwarzenegger had starred in Crocodile Dundee it would have been hilarious. The man was constitutionally incapable of making a bad movie in the 1980s. I should forgive it that – it's not as if this is trying to be a serious alternate history! – but it was on my mind throughout.

The other big problem, apart from a bit too much shouting and shrieking, is that Paul Hogan is a comedian and the Paul Hogan character in this doesn't get to be funny. It could have been any random Australian grump. Weird, when the Schwarzenegger character (played by Tom Kiteley) did get to be funny. Couldn't help thinking they should have built the musical around that character instead.

To be positive, the rather long conclusion, where Hogan thinks about his relationships and his life, had one audience member in tears. (I was too, but only because the theatrical fog caught in my throat.) The cast members who played multiple characters made each of them totally distinct. And Will Usherwood-Bliss as Hugh Jackman was memorable, fighting future Austria with his boomerang claws. **

It's a Wonderful Knife: Christmas Dundee is playing at the Old Joint Stock Threatre, Birmingham, for the rest of December. Tickets available.

Hemlock Grove: A Novel by Brian McGreevy (FSG Originals) | review by Douglas J. Ogurek

Cheap beer in a crystal glass: gifted slackers from different sides of the tracks hunt for a monster.

Two high school senior boys, one a werewolf and the other a vampire, team up to hunt a thrill kill werewolf whose victims are girls. It sounds like another famous vampire/werewolf teen duo, but these two are slackers who bumble around and get into trouble with the law. Gypsy Peter Rumancek lives in a trailer with his pot-smoking mom, and “walking god complex” and human roofie Roman Godfrey, heir to a massive steel mill fortune, lives in a palatial home. They both think the other could be the murderer, so they start a quest to figure out who really is. 

Roman’s sexy mother Olivia has sustained a decades-long affair with her deceased husband’s married brother Norman Godfrey, a psychiatrist at Hemlock Acres Hospital. Peter’s girlfriend Letha, also Godfrey’s daughter, claims she’s been impregnated through divine intervention. Then there’s Shelley, Roman’s seven-foot-five-inch sister who wears boots that resemble milk crates. She is mute and born with physical differences but by no means stupid. Also, she tends to glow. Shelley will come to have a critical role later in the book. 

Dr Pryce is the slick and soulless director of the Godfrey Institute for Biomedical Technologies, also known as the White Tower. He’s involved in something called Project Ouroboros – an ouroboros, by the way, is a symbol of a snake eating its own tail. 

What makes Hemlock Grove so unique is that author Brian McGreevy gives an intense literary treatment to teenybopper subject matter. The result is at times brilliant and at others maddening. Some scenes are highly entertaining: Peter’s recollection of encountering some vampires, for instance, or Roman’s taking over the minds of police officers referred to as “Nose” and “Neck”. And the novel features one of the best werewolf transformation scenes this reviewer has read.

On the other claw, McGreevy gets carried away with elevated language. Doing so may have been permissible and even welcomed at the advent of the monster genre, but this has been done thousands of times since then. Maybe we don’t need to take that subject matter that seriously any more. Examples of other distracting elements include a character reading poetry, a character thinking what it would be like to have a female’s hand on his face, and tangents aplenty. 

As the dispassionate duo attempts to solve the mystery, the story flaps along like a fish taken out of water. Still, despite the showboat sentences and extravagant vocabulary, it can be captivating. 

Hemlock Grove keeps the reader in a semi-haze, which may be intentional. Material is delivered in a variety of formats: traditional third-person narration, erudite emails from Shelley, newspaper articles, psychiatric transcripts, dictation of an autobiography. Also interesting is how Roman treats his sister: always patient and loving… and woe to those who would do her harm. 

Another thing I like: sometimes when one character poses a question to another character, that other character doesn’t respond or ignores the question and moves to another subject. That’s some Seinfeld-level authenticity.

The subject matter is immature and not earth-shattering. Even back in 2012, this stuff had already been done before, but the way the story is told… it’s like putting common beer in an expensive crystal class. Not saying that’s a bad thing. Douglas J. Ogurek ****

Fear Across the Mersey XI: The Brood | review by Rafe McGregor

Fear Across the Mersey by Ramsey Campbell

PS Publishing, hardback, £25.00, August 2024, ISBN 9781803943701

 

Protagonist Blackband is a veterinary surgeon who likes to watch ‘all the local characters’ through his binoculars from the sanctuary of his apartment in Princes Avenue, in Toxteth, famous as the childhood home of Ringo Starr and for rioting in the summer of 1981. Campbell communicates the horrors of urban living in a wonderfully subtle, understated way…the anonymity, isolation, indifference, cruelty. Blackband has a particular interest in two of the locals, a pair of elderly women who live in a derelict house next to his block of flats and have been collecting a menagerie of stray dogs and cats, triggering his professional instincts. This is a slow burner of a story in which the suspense is expertly maintained as he vacillates between doing nothing and finding out what has happened to the animals. First one of the women disappears, then the other, and the stage is set for the finale.

Fear Across the Mersey X: The Invocation | review by Rafe McGregor

Fear Across the Mersey by Ramsey Campbell

PS Publishing, hardback, £25.00, August 2024, ISBN 9781803943701

‘The Invocation’ is the weakest of the collection so far. Like ‘Through the Walls’, the ingredients for a potent plot are set out in quick succession – this time a film studies student with an irritating landlady, a cut glass decanter that distorts its contents (if, indeed, it has any), and shapes and noises in the night – but their chemistry also fails, making the narrative’s cause and effect unmemorable. In addition, the resolution is far too reminiscent of ‘Baby’ and, unlike that story, largely unsupported by a scaffold of internal logic. I wondered if it was either inspired by or an intentional reimagining of M.R. James’ ‘The Ash-Tree’. While ‘The Ash-Tree’ is famous for its dénouement, it is overrated as a ghost story and, in consequence, a challenge for contemporary authors to revisit. As a reimaging of ‘The Ash-Tree’, there is a flicker of Campbell’s genius in ‘The Invocation’, albeit a flicker that never flames.  

Fear Across the Mersey IX: Baby | review by Rafe McGregor

Fear Across the Mersey by Ramsey Campbell

PS Publishing, hardback, £25.00, August 2024, ISBN 9781803943701

Another narrative with a strong opening, in medias res as we meet Dutton, an unemployed alcoholic stalking his elderly neighbour as a precursor to beating her to death. Campbell quickly shifts our sympathy away from the victim by hinting that she may have purchased a baby to either raise as her own, exploit for some nefarious purpose, or both. When Dutton discovers that the ‘old woman’ is pregnant, we cannot be sure whether he is suffering from brain damage caused by long-term alcohol abuse, whether it’s a phantom pregnancy, or whether there is a supernatural element in play. These options are held in a delectable tension when he is stalked himself, by the woman’s pram – which sounds farcical but is both convincing and frightening. Like ‘The Companion’, the initial hook is complemented with a twist in the final sentence, the two devices bookending an accomplished and disturbing tale of urban terror.

Fear Across the Mersey VIII: Through the Walls | review by Rafe McGregor

Fear Across the Mersey by Ramsey Campbell

PS Publishing, hardback, £25.00, August 2024, ISBN 9781803943701

At just over twenty pages, this is one of the longest stories in the collection, together with ‘Concussion’ (the second) and ‘Chucky Comes to Liverpool’ (the twentieth). Where the extended form was integral to the success of ‘Concussion’, ‘Through the Walls’ would have benefitted from more exacting editing. To take just one specific example, ‘fog’ is repeated far too often and there are some very amateurish descriptions throughout the narrative. This is a shame as the ingredients for a literally terrific tale are all introduced immediately: a traditional nuclear family under multiple strains, a traffic accident outside the home, a creepy neighbour with dodgy guests, and an even creepier doll named Fritz. Campbell must also be given credit for tackling what may be the most taboo topic of all in a mature and compelling manner, but unfortunately the potentially explosive chemistry of the opening fails to ignite and the conclusion is ultimately anticlimactic.

Skeleton Crew by Stephen King (Putnam) | review by Douglas J. Ogurek

Storytelling splendour: the enemy has been named, and the enemy isn’t what you’d expect.

Let’s take a moment to explore a trio of stories from a seminal collection by America’s (and arguably the world’s) most-revered living horror writer. Although this year marks Skeleton Crew’s fortieth anniversary, it remains a storytelling model that exemplifies Stephen King’s talent for injecting menace into the mundane, writing concisely with a minimal number of characters (though he can certainly handle a huge cast), and making the most of a looming threat. 

A fall swim with young adults just entering the prime of their lives. A toy monkey. A grandmother. These things are all supposed to bring joy, but not in the master’s hands. 

In “The Raft”, four young adults get trapped on a raft in the middle of a remote lake. The terror floating around them is neither human nor animal, neither ghost nor monster. It is, rather, an amorphous blob of… stuff, toxic stuff with some kind of awareness. And King repeatedly reminds the reader that something bad is going to happen.

The story explores the chummy dynamic – they call each other Pancho and Cisco – between the brainy Randy and the more athletic Deke. Randy, whose perspective the story is told from, is not all that impressed with his girlfriend LaVerne. She has the hots for Deke, who is all but done with his girl Rachel. 

The blob, with its mesmerising colours, becomes an embodiment of the lust and jealousy that jeopardises these relationships as it crawls across the water. Interesting, too, that King names the story not after the threat but rather after the characters’ one means of support. 

“The Monkey” takes the nontraditional monster concept one step further by infusing dread into not only an object but also an object intended to be the opposite of scary: a toy monkey. That’s a bold move. 

Protagonist Hal, now an adult, is surprised that the cursed toy, with its clanging cymbals and creepy smile, has resurfaced after he threw it into a well as a child. 

King weaves in backstory about Hal and his brother discovering the monkey in their vanished father’s closet. The toy, with its portentous chiming, becomes a representation of that father, the mystery surrounding his disappearance, and what he left behind. 

Georgie, the boy protagonist of “Gramma”, keeps watch over his ailing grandmother while his mom takes his brother to the hospital after a baseball game injury. On first read, the story might seem uneventful to a modern reader. But give it another go around, and you will discover a slow burner that grows more terrifying with each page.

As Georgie repeatedly peeks into Gramma’s room, King releases more details about the obese and apparently senile woman: her smell, her flesh, her long fingernails and the sounds they make on the coverlet. Georgie, who has always been afraid of her, suspects something malignant at work.

Backstory filtered through Georgie’s perspective reveals how Gramma is different and aligns the reader with the boy. She gets kicked out of church, for instance, for something to do with books.

He recollects family members expressing apprehension about her through their conversations.

The story’s ending, both shocking and convincing, comments on the hold that our ancestors have on us.

While these are just a few of the gems in Skeleton Crew, they reveal the ingenuity of a master at work, and four decades after their initial publication, they continue to offer lessons in strong writing. ***** Douglas J. Ogurek

Fear Across the Mersey VII: The Companion

Fear Across the Mersey by Ramsey Campbell

PS Publishing, hardback, £25.00, August 2024, ISBN 9781803943701

The second sentence of this story may resonate with other readers who have walked Liverpool’s coast as much as it did with me: ‘A couple of paper cups tumbled and rattled on the shore beneath the promenade, and the cold insinuating October wind scooped the Mersey across the slabs of red rock that formed the beach, across the broken bottles and abandoned tyres.’ The protagonist, a man named Stone, is not just a visitor to the fairground, that staple of the horror genre, but an afficionado who spends each of his holidays in a different one. The first indication that he might be a little more than idiosyncratic is when he has a vision of his dead mother and the tale builds to a taught and thrilling climax when he boards the Ghost Train ride. Campbell matches his early eloquence with a deft narrative twist in the very last sentence.

Fear Across the Mersey VI: The Man in the Underpass | review by Rafe McGregor

Fear Across the Mersey by Ramsey Campbell

PS Publishing, hardback, £25.00, August 2024, ISBN 9781803943701

This story is narrated in the first person by Lynn, a ten-year-old girl, and Campbell captures her voice perfectly, maintaining suspension of disbelief from beginning to end. As the title suggests, the narrative revolves around an underpass, specifically an obscene image painted by graffiti artists, and is driven by another young girl’s obsession with the pre-Columbian deity it depicts. The plot thickens when someone splashes what might be red paint or human or animal blood all over and the police are called. What elevates the tale to the sublime, however, is the atmosphere in which cause and effect take place, which is infected by parental neglect, casual violence, animal cruelty, sexual predation, and an all-too-human predilection for embracing evil in any form it takes. Having already learned to expect the unexpected from Campbell, I wasn’t completely surprised when the identity of the man in the title wasn’t what I anticipated…

Fear Across the Mersey V: The Height of the Scream | review by Rafe McGregor

Fear Across the Mersey by Ramsey Campbell

PS Publishing, hardback, £25.00, August 2024, ISBN 9781803943701

I found this tale difficult to follow, in consequence of swift changes of location accompanied by minimal description, and wasn’t sure if the supernatural was involved or not. The juxtaposed episodes themselves – a hip house party where the hosts attack one another, the scene of a violent suicide, a confrontation with a mutilated war veteran on a bus, the anonymous narrator’s argument with his best friend, and another death – are carefully and innovatively curated, revisiting ‘The Whining’s’ treatment of our great capacities for inhumanity and indifference. I nonetheless felt that I was intended to have a better grasp of whether or not the inhumanity and indifference was merely quotidian or something altogether more spectacular and that the failure wasn’t entirely my own fault. Campbell’s touch is just a little too light here and it’s one of the few short stories I’ve ever read that would have benefitted from more exposition.

Fear Across the Mersey IV: The Whining | review by Rafe McGregor

Fear Across the Mersey by Ramsey Campbell

PS Publishing, hardback, £25.00, August 2024, ISBN 9781803943701

The title of this tale made me chuckle, bringing to mind various colleagues in various workplaces over the years, and I wondered if there would some humour in it. Definitely not: this is the most harrowing so far, a brutally realistic narrative concerning a starving stray dog on the superficial level and staging our capacity for inhumanity to other people and other species at the thematic level. I’ve already mentioned that Campbell has a knack for portraying compelling characters who are unsympathetic, which is evinced again here. On the basis of reading only four of the stories, he also has a knack for setting up the reader’s expectations for narrative resolution and then subverting those expectations. One might say the same of many authors, but Campbell’s subversions are so subtle that he configures an experience which is simultaneously anticipated and astonishing. Clearly the hand of a master of the craft.

Fear Across the Mersey III: The Christmas Present | review by Rafe McGregor

Fear Across the Mersey by Ramsey Campbell

PS Publishing, hardback, £25.00, August 2024, ISBN 9781803943701

The first story in the collection narrated in the first person, with all the challenges and opportunities that brings, and the first where I was familiar with much of the geography (though I’m sure it’s changed considerably in fifty years). ‘The Christmas Present’ is indeed about Christmas in terms of its thematic content and succeeds in exploring the meaning of the holiday in an intellectual and even philosophical way without ever becoming either didactic or dull. This is a signal achievement, given the story’s brevity, and the change of pace in the last two pages creates a rising crescendo with a sudden sense of urgency as Christmas (and who knows what else) approaches at breakneck speed. The conclusion is particularly satisfying, presenting a neat rather than contrived twist, a twist that is both expected and not quite what one was expecting, bringing closure in spite of ending in medias res.

Fear Across the Mersey II: Concussion | review by Rafe McGregor

Fear Across the Mersey by Ramsey Campbell

PS Publishing, hardback, £25.00, August 2024, ISBN 9781803943701

Like so many of the best short stories, ‘Concussion’ begins with a classic and consummate ‘hook’, a device whose purpose is to grab our attention immediately and then drag us through the narrative at breakneck pace until our efforts are rewarded with and in a rich resolution. The hook is the first paragraph, consisting of only two sentences, the second of which is an even bigger barb than the first. Campbell withholds his dénouement until the very last (much longer) paragraph and although it is perfectly plausible, it doesn’t quite fulfil the promise of the preface. What is remarkable, however, is his representation of the surreal or oneiric, sustained with great skill through all the intervening paragraphs. Campbell’s effortless switches between flashbacks and flashforwards are not only completely coherent, but provide a continual reminder that what we are reading is one or more of a hallucination, illusion, fantasy, or daydream.

Theaker's Quarterly Fiction #78 is now out in paperback and ebook!

free epub | free pdf | print UK | print USA | Kindle UK | Kindle US

Welcome to Theaker's Quarterly Fiction #78: Returns, edited by Stephen Theaker and John Greenwood! It's here at last! A year late but ready to rock!

This issue contains four pulse-pounding short stories:

• "Two Copyrights Don’t Make a Wrong" by Dan Muenzer
• "Drawermongers" by William Foulke
• "Any Other Way" by Michael Hart
• "The Red Trees" by Rafe McGregor.

In the Quarterly Review, Stephen Theaker, Douglas J. Ogurek and Rafe McGregor review books by Ian Bain and chums, Matthew Hughes, Rachel Harrison, Christina Dalcher, Joe Dever, Camilla Sten and Kristi DeMeester, as well as the films All of Us Strangers, Badland Hunters, Hanu-Man, Lisa Frankenstein, Madame Web, The Parades and Poor Things, and season 4 of the television programme For All Mankind.

Here are the extremely patient contributors to this issue.

Dan Muenzer is an educator from Honolulu, Hawai’i. He dreams of one day writing a page-for-page duplication of Robert Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy.

Douglas J. Ogurek is the pseudonymous and sophomoric founder of the unsplatterpunk subgenre, which uses splatterpunk conventions (transgressive/gory/gross/violent subject matter) to deliver a positive message. His short story collection I Will Change the World … One Intestine at a Time (Plumfukt Press), a juvenile stew of horror and bizarro, aims to make readers lose their lunch while learning a lesson. Ogurek also guest-edits the wildly unpopular UNSPLATTERPUNK! “smearies”, published by Theaker’s Quarterly Fiction. These anthologies are unavailable at your library and despised by your mother. Ogurek reviews films and fiction for that same magazine.

Michael Hart writes stories that blend fantasy, science fiction and horror genres. His stories have appeared in Dark Tales, Frost Zone and Mythic Circle, to name a few. He is a copywriter, an electronic waste recycler and a father of two young children, with whom he spends hours building the most fantastical worlds of all.

Rafe McGregor is a critical theorist publishing on Anglophone culture, political violence, and policing. He is the author of twenty books, including Reducing Political Violence: Narrative Accounts of Crime and Harm (2026), Anthropocide: An Essay in Green Cultural Criminology (2025) and The Adventures of Roderick Langham (2017).

William Foulke is the MFA graduate of Vermont College of Fine Arts who aims to become the next Master of Horror. When he’s not exploring the curious and the terrifying at his keyboard, he enjoys traveling to unique destinations. He resides in Pennsylvania where he’s working on his first novel. See www.williamfoulke.com for more information.

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As ever, all back issues of Theaker's Quarterly Fiction are available for free download.

Fear Across the Mersey I: The Cellars | review by Rafe McGregor

Fear Across the Mersey by Ramsey Campbell

PS Publishing, hardback, £25.00, August 2024, ISBN 9781803943701

 

A few years ago, my wife and I moved to Merseyside, but I never settled in properly. It doesn’t help that I dislike football and don’t worship the Beatles. Or that we spent much of the first two years either locked down or socially distanced. I have a similarly ambivalent attitude towards Britain’s greatest living horror author, lifelong Liverpudlian Ramsey Campbell. While I recognise his talent, I’ve never been bowled over by his most critically acclaimed work. When I saw that PS Publishing had released a collection of his locally based short stories last year, I thought it the perfect opportunity to rekindle my enthusiasm for Campbell and the city in which I will probably spend the rest of my life. I also thought I’d try my hand at a rolling review, reviewing each of the twenty-four short stories as I read them. They are all previously published, from 1967 to 2021, and presented in a loosely chronological order. Fear Across the Mersey has an afterword, but no introduction so I’ll dive straight in…The first half or so of ‘The Cellars’ is overwritten, with too many adjectives, too much imagery, and some idiosyncratic combinations of verb and noun. Notwithstanding, the story improves as soon as the protagonist, Julie, enters Liverpool’s catacombs, where Campbell succeeds in making ordinary fungi genuinely sinister. Very quickly after the visit, he creates an exquisite tension that builds to a climax both inevitable and not quite what one was expecting. Though I’ve not read a great deal of Campbell, he seems to have a real knack for portraying compelling characters who are unsympathetic, which is Julie in a nutshell. She is interesting enough to for us to want to know her fate and disagreeable enough for us not to care what it is. A slow-starter, but also a slow-burner. 

The Wolf of Whindale: A Tale of Northalbion | review by Rafe McGregor

 

The Wolf of Whindale: A Tale of Northalbion by Jacob Kerr

Serpent’s Tail, hardback, £16.99, October 2025, ISBN 9781800811522

 

It’s difficult to pinpoint The Wolf of Whindale in terms of genre. I’ve seen it advertised as both ‘folk horror’ and ‘gothic horror’. I can see why publicists or reviewers would choose one or both of these classifications, but neither is accurate. Is the novel even a horror story? Probably, but there are also elements of fantasy, especially if one takes the evocation of wonder as definitive of that genre. This difficulty should have been my first clue that it is in fact – and by my own definition – a weird tale, i.e. a fictional narrative that is philosophical in virtue of presenting or representing a fully-fledged and fleshed-out worldview, generically hybrid in character, and foregrounding the difference between the world as we think it is and the world as it actually is. Does it have a worldview? Yes, definitely, albeit one that is admirably subtle, rising to the surface on rare occasions so as entangle the reader in a distinctly perspectival frame of reference. The antagonist, you see, is not just a medieval monster, but a modern one, a vampiric exploiter of the oppressed who might have leapt straight out of the pages of Karl Marx’s Capital (a Marxist pamphlet called First Principles of Political Economy also makes an appearance). Like many weird tales from the previous century, the story is also occult detective fiction and the horror and mystery elements are integrated effectively and efficiently.

The Wolf of Whindale is Jacob Kerr’s second novel, following The Green Man of Eshwood Hall (published in 2022, also by Serpent’s Tail), and is set in the same universe, an alternative Northumbria (the northeast of England, close to the Scottish border) called Northalbion. This is, I think, the purpose of the subtitle, which is otherwise superfluous. Where The Green Man of Eshwood Hall is set in Northalbion in 1962, the main narrative of The Wolf of Whindale takes place a century before, in 1845. There are seventeen chapters, including the prologue, which – along with three other chapters – are excerpts from a lecture on Mithras, a Roman deity popular with the soldiers occupying Britannia, delivered by Dr Erasmus Wintergreen in 1916. The rest of the chapters are narrated in the first person by Caleb Malarkey, a twenty-four-year-old lead miner and autodidact who suffers from seizures that might be epilepsy…or something more sinister. Caleb’s chapters, which constitute most of the novel, are written in a vernacular (or, perhaps more accurately, in the representation of a vernacular) that is perfectly pitched, with Kerr avoiding distracting punctuation and idiosyncratic diction. (For those that do get a little lost, though I can’t imagine many will, there is a glossary located between the final chapter and the acknowledgements.) Caleb plunges his audience into a world where hard manual labour is the norm, promoted and perpetuated by the austerity of ubiquitous Christianity, and there is a rigid social division between workers and owners, also with the church’s agreement and approval. 

Caleb’s narrative is set in motion very quickly, when the union steward in Caleb’s gang of miners is found dead on Windy Top, his body mutilated and head severed. His death follows the disappearance of another local union official three months before and both incidents have been connected to the eponymous wolf, which may or may not be anything more than a legend. Caleb’s sceptical reflection on the two incidents is one of Kerr’s first revelations of the novel’s worldview: ‘The illogic of it all overwhelmed me, and, though still light-headed from my seizure, I sat up and found myself holding forth on how the deaths of two such fellows, both leaders of combinations of miners, was an almighty coincidence, and that this wolf’s palate was certainly a dainty one in preferring flavours that secured the interests of the status quo.’ When the miners go on strike, they are beaten up by ex-soldiers and replaced with Welshmen. Caleb proves the accuracy of his self-description as a contrary and cantankerous chap by crossing the picket line and joining the ‘blacklegs’. The narrative presses forward into its complication when Caleb’s colleagues punish him for his disloyalty. Disowned by his mother and sister and despised by his neighbours, he leaves The Uplands for the Sill. The Sill, which is to the west of Northalbion, is a vast mine owned by a man named Master Siskin, who seems happy to employ anyone and everyone on an indefinite basis and has no shortage of work to offer. Once Caleb reaches the Sill, he finds out that it is an excavation rather than a mine and that the labourers have been hunting for a Mithraic artefact called the Knack. He meets the Welsh miners, who moved on after the strike, joins the dig, and eventually finds the Knack, after which he is taken to Siskin’s stately home, Brink House.

Before Caleb leaves The Uplands, there is mention of the Laidly Worm (of Spindleston Heugh or Bamborough), a Northumbrian shapeshifter in which I have a particular interest, and it made me think about Kerr’s options in terms of the wolf as one of England’s black dog legends, a subject on which I’ve written for nearly twenty years now. Essentially, there are only three choices: either the dog/wolf is corporeal (a particularly large and savage specimen of its species, as in Conan Doyle’s The Hound of the Baskervilles) or it is a ghost that can only scare people to death (the case with the Barghest and Black Shuck, England’s most famous black dogs) or it is a werewolf (my favourite example of which is Stephen King’s novella, Cycle of the Werewolf). Kerr plays with these different options very cleverly, teasing his readers with different takes on each – including whether there is any dog/wolf at all – before disclosing the truth, which is both complex and satisfying. This disclosure, however, is my sole criticism of the novel. There is a full chapter of retrospective exposition fairly late (chapter 10, the eleventh of seventeen), while Caleb is a guest and prisoner in Brink House and in spite of being fascinating, it almost grinds the tale to a premature halt. Notwithstanding, Kerr compensates with both a neat twist concerning Caleb’s work at the Sill and a heightening of the stakes when the Prince of Wales and his entourage arrive. The resolution is masterful, drawing together all of the murder mystery, the confrontation with the monster, and the relationship between Caleb’s narrative and Dr Wintergreen’s lecture. Overall, The Wolf of Whindale is a complete success, a rare example of a contemporary weird tale well-told and an exemplar for other tellers of weird tales to follow. 

Rainforest | review by Rafe McGregor

 

Rainforest by Michelle Paver

Orion Books, hardback, £20.00, October 2025, ISBN 9781398723207 

 

Michelle Paver is an Oxford educated British author best known for her Chronicles of Ancient Darkness, a children’s fantasy series of nine books that began with Wolf Brother in 2004 and concluded with Wolfbane in 2022. The novels are aimed at children from the ages of nine to thirteen, have been translated into thirty languages, and have sold over two and a half million copies. Paver has also published Daughters of Eden, an historical trilogy; Gods and Warriors, an historical series for children; and five standalone novels. All of her published work is historical in setting, albeit varying dramatically, from six thousand to one hundred years in the past. Among her standalone novels, three are horror stories: Dark Matter (2010), which is set in the Arctic in 1928; Thin Air (2016), set in the Himalayas in 1935; and Wakenhyrst (2019), set in the fens of Edwardian Suffolk. Dark Matter and Thin Air are two of the best horror novels (or, more accurately, novellas) I have ever read. Until reading Dark Matter shortly after it was published, I’d considered James Buchan’s The Gate of Air: A Ghost Story (2008) my favourite contemporary horror story, but unlike the latter, Dark Matter and Thin Air have rewarded repeated readings. Wakenhyrst is longer than its predecessors and of a similar quality, although I found it harder going, which is because of my indifference to the haunted house trope rather than because of any flaws. (I must confess that even Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House and Richard Matheson’s Hell House leave me cold…and I’m not referring to my spine.)

Rainforest is Paver’s twenty-third novel, sixth standalone novel, and fourth horror novel. It also completes an informal trilogy with Dark Matter and Thin Air, all of whom are about and narrated by well educated, old fashioned British men who have difficulty socialising and lead conflicted inner lives. Writing with and in the voice of another gender is, I think, very difficult and Paver is one of the few authors to succeed completely. All three novellas (Rainforest is longer than the other two, but still a novella) read exactly as if they’d been written by the protagonists Paver has presented with such and competence and conviction and all three are men we wouldn’t want to spend much time with, but whose lives are nonetheless captivating and compelling. The three novellas also demonstrate an enviable expertise in representing the experiences of living and working in inhospitable environments – whether icy in temperature, high in altitude, or crushing in humidity – without resorting to lengthy exposition. Rainforest is, as the title suggests, set in the Mexican rainforest, very likely the Lacandon Jungle, which was part of the Maya civilisation in the preclassic period, in 1973. Dr Simon Corbett is a forty-two-year-old entomologist from Cambridge who specialises in the predation of mantids or Mantidae (praying mantises). When we meet him, he is recovering from a mental health crisis connected to the death of a woman named Penelope and en route to an archaeological dig in the jungle, where he hopes to both recover his equilibrium and resurrect a stalled academic career.

Corbett has been advised to keep a journal by his doctor and that journal is what constitutes the majority of the novella. Penelope was, it appears, Corbett’s first girlfriend, which is the first suggestion of how much of a misfit he is (their relationship and her death both being recent). He also disapproves of the cultural, social, and political changes of the preceding decade, dislikes the Indigenous People of Mexico (a typically baseless and irrational racism), and is frightened and disgusted by their ancient and contemporary rituals of self-mutilation. Paver is often compared to M.R. James and while there is definitely a ‘Jamesian’ atmosphere to and in her horror, there is also a ‘Lovecraftian’ scope and more accurate description is that she combines the virtues of both masters of the weird tale with a contemporary sensibility and sensitivity in a way that may well be unique. The plot of Rainforest is driven by the subtle integration of two narratives. The first is in the present and follows Corbett’s journey to the camp, tensions with both his British and Mexican coworkers, and his unsuccessful search for mantids. While these events are unfolding, he also becomes more open about his past with Penelope, revisiting and revising what he has previously revealed. Penelope, it turns out, was an acquaintance not a lover and her death in a car crash occurred in the course of her flight from Corbett. He is, indeed, a stalker, who became obsessed with her after a single, short dinner date and who was the recipient of a lawyer’s letter and a police caution. The pull and push between present and past, effect and cause, representation and reality retrospectively infuses previous passages with new (and sinister) meaning while heightening the narrative tension. To take just three examples, the novella opens with Corbett fondling something he calls his ‘talisman’. I’ll avoid spoilers by not revealing precisely what it is, suffice to say that the object seems to be a bizarre but harmless keepsake. Similarly, his entomology seems to be a relatively insignificant part of his personality, perhaps even a narrative device to bring him to the jungle, but his expertise in mantid predation is no contingency. Finally, Corbett's reaction to an illustration in a book seems either absurd, tangential to the plot, or both, but is a crucial component of the narrative crisis.

While Rainforest is neither didactic nor even a case of the ‘instructing by pleasing’ tradition of literature, it does explore a theme that is relevant to and resonates with everyday life in the twenty-first century. The novella explores this theme in a singular and inventive way and simultaneously reinvents the ghost story as an aesthetic form. First, Paver asks us to reconceive or at least reconsider ghosts as stalkers. Not stalkers in terms of the denotation of the word, the hunting of humans or animals by other humans or animals, but in the legal connotation of men stalking women with whom they have become obsessed. Regardless of whether they were perpetrators or victims, ghosts are dead things that are obsessed with an aspect of their animate lives – either with the places where they lived or died or with people whom they despised or loved. Like the stalker, the ghost is an unwelcome and uninvited presence that disturbs and disrupts the mental (and sometimes physical) wellbeing of the person it haunts or of the people who enter the place it haunts. Aside from and in addition to the richness of this thematic exploration of what ghosts are, Paver reverses or inverts the traditional ghost story in and with Rainforest, presenting her readers with a (living) person stalking a (dead) ghost. Where one might expect Penelope to stalk Corbett from beyond the grave in revenge, it is Corbett’s pathological fixation that fails to recognise death as an impediment. As he stalked her in life, so he continues to stalk her in death, deluding himself that he is driven by guilt rather than accepting his predatory desire to possess her against her will. I can’t recommend this book enough. If you haven’t yet discovered the pleasures of Paver, follow up with Thin Air, Dark Matter…and Wakenhyrst too.

The Strigun's Cartography Workshop | review by Rafe McGregor

The Strigun's Cartography Workshop: Maps for Novels, Board Games, D&D Campaigns, or Decoration

In Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad’s alter ego, Charles Marlow, describes himself as being fascinated by maps from an early age – particularly maps with blank spaces – and such fascination has probably accounted for a great deal of harm over the centuries. It certainly seems to have been shared by many people across multiple generations. My own interest in maps was much more limited and less consequential and I only ever saw them as a tool for orienting myself until I came across what I later realised were world famous: J.R.R. Tolkien’s maps for first The Hobbit and then The Lord of the Rings. This must have been sometime in the late seventies and the latter were tucked into the dustjackets of the editions my parents kept at home (probably from the nineteen sixties). There were two different maps and I can’t remember which map was in which part of the trilogy, but I reproduce the better-known one here (above).

Later, I discovered Fighting Fantasy, Lone Wolf, and Dungeons & Dragons and began to appreciate the artistic qualities of maps a little more. They nonetheless remained first and foremost a way of orienting myself, to the wonders of an unexplored fantasy world, even though I recognised that Lone Wolf and the AD&D Greyhawk campaign maps in particular had an aesthetic appeal beyond the practical. When I replaced the editions of The Lord of the Rings, I kept the maps from the originals. I’m not entirely sure why, but I still have them. 

Earlier this year, I visited friends in Croatia and met Endi, the proprietor of The Strigun’s Cartography Workshop, in Trsat in Rijeka. I had been told that he created maps to order, but didn’t think too much about it and, if I remember correctly, most of our conversation was about film, one of several shared interests. He was, however, kind enough to give me two of his maps as a memento of my visit, one of Trsat Castle, which looms over Rijeka like an eagle on its perch, and the other of the province of Istria, where I visited Pula, which boasts an almost entirely intact Roman amphitheatre.

I didn’t get the chance to look at them properly until I returned home, when I was awed by their beauty. The photographs (above and right) do not do them justice and they are as pleasing as artifacts to hold and touch as they are works of visual art. Had I greater expertise in the visual arts, I could describe them more eloquently, but one does not need to be an afficionado to recognise their quality. I was, of course, struck by the similarity in style to Tolkien, though when one compares and contrasts the two, Endi is clearly the superior artist. In addition, he will make maps to order and his website is well worth browsing, whether for a commission or just for pleasure. The maps are divided among regions, cities, and battles and there is a separate page for the work he has had published to date. As the website reveals, the Strigun’s maps come in both two-tone and full colour and there is even a map for Game of Thrones…how could there not be!

Dating After the End of the World by Jeneva Rose (Montlake) | review by Stephen Theaker

Amazon Prime subscribers currently get at least one book free to own each month, sometimes two. I tended to claim but not read them, but they have started to include more novellas and short stories, and that has led me to read outside my usual genres, which I appreciate. One thing immediately obvious to anyone looking at Amazon First Reads is that the books on offer are virtually all by female writers, and aimed at female readers, with female protagonists. One can only assume Amazon follows the data in that respect, which is interesting.

This book fits that pattern, but that’s not to say male readers can’t enjoy it too. I did, to a certain extent. It begins with a scene in September 2009, when our Wisconsinite protagonist was thirteen years old and getting fed up with her doomsday prepper dad. They are building a perimeter fence but Casey would rather be having fun. She’s getting bullied at school by kids who think her dad is weird – and you know what, she thinks he’s weird too. Skip forward to 2025 and Casey is Dr Warner, working in a hospital, and not talking to her dad very often.