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.
