Damnable Tales: A Folk Horror Anthology

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She looked on the country as something excellent and wholesome in its way, which was apt to become troublesome if you encouraged it overmuch. Anthologies don't get much better than this masterful assembly of 23 horror shorts, first published between 1872 and 1964.

Sometimes (more often in the older stories) these lead to a denouement in which the protagonist either witnesses or is drawn into a specific bizarre happening, but in others the point seems to be more to leave the reader with a general sense of foreboding or unease without any specific event at the conclusion.This is a great story, and one of the oldest in the collection- Nesbit was writing at the same time as Arthur Conan Doyle!

He is one of the ‘talking heads’ on the Severin films' documentary, Woodlands Dark and Days Bewitched: A History of Folk Horror’. And yes some of the stories where indeed good, but these where all stories I had read before so this anthology was not bringing me anything new and exciting. I also enjoyed ‘Pallinghurst Barrow’, just because of its bizarre encounter in the tomb, and because the author had thought to provide us with a more mundane explanation for the events. Together they take the reader beyond the safety and familiarity of the town, to where unholy rites, witches’ curses, sinister traditions and ancient horrors lurk within the landscape.

These are the settings of our ancestors, and therefore are still carried somewhere deep within us now: remote villages and darkened lanes, lonely woodlands, obscure country houses and crumbling cemeteries.

There are 23 short stories in this volume, and each is accompanied by its own newly commissioned woodcut style lino print at the beginning of each tale. It has the feel of a genuine folk narrative, and shows that Le Fanu wasn't finished after 'In a Glass Darkly'. He has delivered talks on these subjects at numerous events and symposiums including at Cambridge University and the British Museum in London. as with all horror, I find the reasons why it is seen as scary always so interesting, and with folk horror I think this is so deeply a fear of post-industrial revolution humans, of conquering humans, of hegemonic humans, of consumer humans, that they truly lack control over the world and its functionings and that 'civility' as it has been established is under threat or was even futile in its establishment.R. James, Shirley Jackson and Algernon Blackwood, alongside eerie tales by those less associated with the horror genre, like John Buchan, E. Outside of his television work, he makes and sells his own darkly folkloric artwork, often lino cut and hand-printed. Though there are intricate illustrations I found the first couple of stories had so much archaic old English that they were difficult to follow, others needed the dictionary by my side, there were so many words that needed looking up, thereby breaking up the story IMO.

If you're unfamiliar with Wells' work, think late medieval woodcut crossed with more modern horror tropes: he has a way of drawing a dead, unseeing eye (often required in these stories) which is genuinely mortifying. A lot of the stories picked up the theme of Christianity coming into conflict with the pagan gods, and I enjoyed how sometimes they came to an easy truce. The fact that it took me literally weeks to finally finish this thing should tell you everything you need to know.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. And while the hustle and bustle of modern life means we often think ourselves far removed from a world haunted by pixies and ghouls… Are we really that far from horror? I also very much approve of the avenging ghost in John Collier's 'The Lady of the Grey' ensuring a pervy old toff chasing local farm girls gets his just desserts. However, I particularly enjoyed ‘Man-size in Marble’ and ‘The Lady On the Grey’, while Thomas Hardy’s ‘The Withered Arm’ is a well constructed piece of writing.