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!