The Hamlet by Joanna Corrance (NewCon Press) | review by Stephen Theaker

The Hamlet is a fairly good mosaic novella, telling a series of stories about the people in a small rural community in Scotland, close to a stony beach but not too far away from a city. It used to be quite a nice place to live, but then things got “strange” – that’s the word everyone uses to describe it. There are various theories – the end of the world, a passing comet, a great unravelling – but no one is quite sure what happened.

Whatever it was, it happened in early spring. Everyone was told to get inside their homes and stay there for the indefinite future, very much like the Covid lockdowns. Supermarkets and local shops still deliver food, but in armoured vans, and sometimes the drivers go missing, the vans abandoned. The bins aren’t being collected, the police don’t answer calls, and there are roadblocks everywhere.

There’s still electricity and running water, because at least some essential workers still go out to work, but it’s risky out there. And as we learn in this set of stories, it’s risky indoors too. After a very brief introductory chapter about the day of the lockdown, we move from house to house, to see what strangeness is happening in each.

The stories overlap, with hints in each followed up in others, which was satisfying in some ways, in that mysteries are being solved, but it also meant that by the time we encountered some things first-hand, from the point of view of those directly involved, the shock of the weird had often been dulled by prior exposure.

That might be why the first proper story (or second chapter, if you like) “Down the Drain” was the most effective for me, because after its protagonist Beth leaves her filthy house by way of a newly broken (and strangely expansive) pipe, she dips her head into other houses, giving us a dose of concentrated weirdness. One could easily imagine a Junji Ito adaptation.

After that we learn about Polly, a neglected little girl with a big imagination; wannabe influencer Helen, whose uploads get ever more barmy; Eve, who becomes a lodger in the house she rents out to creepy Matthew; Robyn, a frustrated artist who gets way too into dollhouses; and Jeanie, whose charmed life seems to have run out of luck.

A short final chapter, set much later than the rest, bookends the novella, answers some questions, and provides a final twist or two. By that point, it felt like a good place to stop. Not because it’s a bad book, but because it had played all its cards, some of them too soon. And maybe it was all a bit too random for me: if anything at all can happen at any time, the characters’ decisions count for little. ***