Morgan never believed her father killed her mother. She spent the last six years of her life actively campaigning for his release, which eventually resulted in a mistrial ruling and his subsequent release. This is where The Folly (2023) by Gemma Amor begins, with the forty-something Morgan taking her father back into her daily life. However, campaigning costs have left her somewhat impoverished, and, in true gothic fashion, they move into an isolated folly on the Cornish coast.

A folly, for those uninitiated, is a pointless piece of architecture. It’s a grand building made by rich folk out of ideas of what to do with their cash, typically on the edges of large estates. The folly in this book is a tower, (“decorative, brooding, and yet wholly frivolous”) that looks out to sea and has something of a dark history, thanks to a local writer jumping from its height, just as a woman did in one of her books.

Amor’s story is relaxed and engaging as it builds, showing the awkward relationship between a daughter rediscovering her father and a man shrunken by the state. It’s a great dynamic, believable and it nicely unravels as time passes. Her dogged belief in his innocence is tested as details emerge that former trials had failed to uncover. The first fifty pages that lead them to the titular folly are great.

But this is a darker tale than just a slim family drama, and the book prematurely jumps into another type of folly: the folie à deux. No sooner have they moved into the tower, do strange things start happening. A mysterious light comes by; a stranger visits with an unusual but familiar voice. Morgan, as narrator, is unreliable and we are never sure whether what she recounts is real, imagined, or, as per the folie à deux, shared.

There’s much to like with The Folly. Amor’s writing captures the lonely coast, and brings in its sights, scents, and sounds. However, she seems to be rushing somewhere. What starts as a measured, character-driven piece that takes its time soon becomes an unrewarding reveal that is too on-the-nose and unearned. The ending is nicely ambiguous, but there’s a sense that whatever daddy issues are being worked out are so far inconclusive.

Amma (2024) by Saraid de Silva is a time-hopping, peripatetic debut novel that explores the matrilineal line of a single family over three generations. Though it chronologically runs from 1951 through 2019, de Silva presents a fractured narrative, jumping back and forward between key situations in the characters’ lives, gradually peeling away the layers of its story to reveal a tale about diaspora, family, and fitting in.

The novel opens in London, 2018, with Annie Ano Fernando, calling upon her uncle Suri who she has never met. No sooner has he opened the door, we are whisked off Invercargill in 1984, to meet a school-aged instance of Sithara, Annie’s mother. Then, following an incident there with local lads, we land in Singapore, in 1951, where the story finds its real inciting incident. Ten year old Josephina (the Amma of the title) is locked in a room with a rich Englishman, her potential new father-in-law, who rapes her, seemingly with her parents’ tacit approval. It’s an awful and scarring moment that effectively drives the generational dynamic and the attitudes therein.

Across the decades, we may say that all human life is here, but even while weighted to the more miserable side, it never feels heavy or forced. In fact, there’s a lightness to de Salva’s prose and it’s polished enough to sparkle (“They sieve her, trying to shake out a flaw.”) while never being showy. But where the real strength comes is in the believable characters that run through its pages. Come the last page, I could happily have spent more time with them. Maybe this is because we see them all growing up, as the book hops around, and we see how their reaction to events in the past have shaped their future. But maybe just because, through good and bad, they are fully-formed and full of life.

In reading Amma, I was somewhat reminded of Jonathan Escoffery’s recent debut, If I Survive You (2022) where the younger son in an immigrant family searched for himself at the crossroads of culture and community. Amma treads similar, if less experimental ground, with its three generations experiencing difficulties fitting in, not just in terms of place but with each other.

With Annie, naive to her family’s past, she acts as a way into the broader story. Her youthful zest is at odds with those that have gone before, Her attitude to her abusive father is one-eighty to her mother’s open arms. The experience around her sexuality comes differently than to her gay uncle. But familial attitudes are ultimately driven by her gran whose own shame resonates through the bloodline directing attitudes and actions.

Overall it’s a tight storyline, with great steady-as-she-goes writing (though I occasionally got a bit disoriented with the switching timelines). Across its canvas we find people are likely to find their place in the world easier, whether that be in geography, relationships, or sexuality when acceptance is at the heart of families that move forward with neither secrets nor shame.

Musicians penning novels is nothing new. Leonard Cohen and Nick Cave have done it to considerable acclaim. Morrissey’s “unpolished turd” took a beating while Pete Townshend’s recent effort was seen to be middling. In Scotland, under his Momus monicker, Nick Currie has released six novels to date and Stuart David, formerly of Belle and Sebastian, has two to his name. Colin MacIntyre, better known for the last twenty plus years as Mull Historical Society, now adds a second to his own bibliography with When The Needle Drops (2024).

Although Ivor Punch, the copper at the centre of the novel is not a new creation (MacIntyre’s 2015 debut was titled, The Letters of Ivor Punch), this book is the first in a crime series dubbed The Mull Mysteries. Mull, out on the west coast of Scotland, is one of the largest islands in Britain though less densely populated than others. There’s a remoteness to its single track roads and small villages, and the prospect of a crime series set there is welcome, though it may in time have locals eyeing each other with increased suspicion as the crime rate creeps up.

Set in the week before Christmas in 1998, Punch is expecting another sleepy time of it, such is island life. But things are about to change when a child is reported missing, a musician disappears in an unscheduled flight from a local airfield, and strange effigies are found around the island. Could they be connected? That’s for Punch to find out.

The novel takes inspiration from the Great Mull Air Mystery, an unsolved case from 1975 where a musician took off in a solo night flight and promptly disappeared. Though his body was later found, in mysterious circumstances, neither the reason nor the plane have ever been found. MacIntyre takes the case’s lacunae and imagines his own backstory over a fictional instance of the mystery, overlapping it with his own subplots, and sending in his detective.

Billed as “tartan noir with a musical twist”, it’s certainly shot through with a passion for music. From Punch’s spinning of Rod Stewart records, the namedropping of bands no doubt drawn from MacIntyre’s own touring experiences, and nods to appearances on Jools Holland. We don’t have Chapters, but ‘Tracks’, split into Side A and Side B. That its plot also centres around musicians adds to the whole musical experience. But as far as the noir aspect goes, it probably comes down on the lighter side due to its frequent, though rarely dark, humour. There’s plenty of patter in the dialogue, which is often a joy.

Despite its contemporary-ish setting, its limited cast add to the remoteness of the place, and at times, even with a severed hand in play, I felt it had the aura of golden age cosiness. This may also be down to its people, often characterised with amusing nicknames, but to my mind in need of more than good banter to bring them to greater life on the page. Punch’s oft repeated catchphrase (‘And fuck’) is one that I can’t fathom, rhythmically or contextually, so I have no idea how it should be delivered.

Arguably, When The Needle Drops won’t fully satisfy seasoned readers of darker crime fiction (who like a dose of introspection and existentialism with their dead bodies), but it may well capture the curious reader looking to dip their toes in the genre. In this novel we visit a limited patch of locations (mostly Tobermory, Salen, and Calgary Bay), but as a setting Mull is definitely awash with interesting places for Punch’s future cases, and the local tourist board will no doubt be watching with interest. As it’s the first of a planned series, I’m sure MacIntyre’s plotting will improve with each effort, but my feeling is that this Punch needs a stronger hook.

“I don’t go out anymore, a restlessness has come over me, and I don’t go out.” is how Baard, the narrator of Jon Fosse’s Boathouse (1989, tr: May-Brit Akerholt, 2017), begins his minimal account of the seismic events that collided with his small life. What he means by restlessness is never quite clear, but it has driven him from all that he would do – help his mother shop, play occasional guitar, and read books from the library – to staying at home, in his attic room, and writing a novel, purportedly the one we are reading.

In this, Baard is our typical Fossean loner, a speck in the emptiness of the Norwegian fjords. The epitome of failure, he’s a thirty-something that still lives with his mother and has never had an education nor held full-term employment. The only consistent thing is that he has played in bands. Until recently he played, sidelined, in a band called Torkjell’s Duo with local high school teacher, Torkjell. But he once played with his friend Knut many years before, when they used to practise down by an abandoned boathouse. And it’s this past that comes to the fore when, one summer, Knut and his family holiday in the area and they meet for the first time in years.

Since those childhood days, Knut has moved away, got married, had two children, and become a music teacher while Baard is the same old Baard. It’s been about ten years since they last met and anyone who knows the distance past friendships can attain, when the silences are awkward and there is little to say, will recognise the discomfort in this reunion. However, it’s not all bad as Knut’s wife, whose name we never learn, seems to take a shine to Baard, and the story spreads out, in a minimalist way, to explore both the past and an unconventional love triangle that has, at its heart, darker territories to fish. 

True to Fosse’s style, the prose is hypnotic in its repetition, although this time there’s the sense that Baard is trying to process past and present, coming at them from different angles but unable to grasp his underlying malaise. But repetition is also at the heart of the story’s structure, with the first, and longest section, giving Baard’s point of view on events before he returns in the second section to view Knut’s side of the story, albeit still in first person. One of the things that Fosse maintains across these tellings is a heavy sense of dread, tightening the story ever more taut until, in a short third coda, the book is tied up with devastating consequences.

In its recollection of childhood, with guitars and youth centres, it feels like a more coherent take on some of the vignettes from Scenes From A Childhood (1994, tr: Damion Searls, 2018), but also a lengthier riff on How It Started (1987, tr: Damion Searls, 2013) in its experience of both attraction and shyness around the opposite sex. While Boathouse shares the isolated world of other Fosse books, where the occasional house overlooks placid lakes and mountains, its internal landscape is different. Inside minds, the most internal of feelings, however minimal, can have seismic repercussions that require us to cope, whether we can or not. And Boathouse shows a man trying even though his whole life suggests he has never tried before.

Mark Valentine’s collection of short stories, Lost Estates (2024) is bookended by two long tales that begin with journeys through an England abundant in history and arcana and ultimately end in the supernatural. A Chess Game at Michaelmas, is a strong opener, and invites us to a dilapidated mansion as its narrator explores local variants on historical peppercorn rents, with the unusual ancient arrangement on this mansion, collected during the visit.

The niche interest here is exemplary of Valentine’s narrators. They are antiquarian in their motivations, and the stories see them single-mindedly in pursuit of lost works, personal superstitions, or picking at the history of English inn signs. Indeed, in the latter (The Understanding of the Signs) what begins as an exploration of said signs soon slips beyond the veneer of reality to find a deeper resonance, where both ‘understanding’ and ‘signs’ find new light.

The borders of reality, as per the influence of Arthur Machen, are where Valentine pitches his tales. The House of Flame, is a title not unlike Machen’s more famous works, and indeed it’s a biographical take on the Welsh mystic, imagining, by way of the death of General Gordon (a somewhat forgotten example of British derring-do), how the young writer finds inspiration that drives his burgeoning development as a writer. Another writer, in The End of Alpha Street, seeks to collect personal folklores, those unusual superstitions that people make for themselves.

There are other interesting tales, such as The Seventh Card, where a man attempts to identify the mysterious sender of Christmas cards and a personal favourite in And maybe the parakeet was correct, where a journalist contrives to deliver copy on human interest stories with tangential nods to football and, along the way, experiences an uncanny encounter in the streets of Paris. Laughter Ever After may help certain bookish collectors feel seen with its lighthearted trip to a village in search of an obscure ghost story that may not exist.

While time feels suggested in these stories, rather than observed, place is very much to the fore. A couple of stories take place in urban areas, but the book’s comfort zone is clearly rural, among villages and the lonelier spots at the corner of civilisation’s eye. Fortunes Told: Fresh Samphire, is Valentine’s prose at its most ethereal as one man investigates the disappearance of a man called Crabbe, who may – or may not – be the Philip Crabbe that appears in the later story, The Readers of the Sands, where a trio of experts are invited to his house to determine whether there are hidden messages in the sand on the nearby beach. Closer, The Fifth Moon, also takes us to sandy spaces in search of King John’s lost treasure, and discusses theories and posits its own.

Though the stories never reveal their full hand, they do satisfy and offer much to mull over and reward rereading, thanks to how lightly they wear their erudition. Certainly there is much allusion that, having chosen to explore these threads, the stories gain depth. That the supernatural elements and new worlds barely glimpsed offer little clue as to whether their spectral nature is benign or has hostile intent. But even when things seem more explicit, such as in Worse Things Than Serpents, we are never truly sure. There, the narrator finds, off the beaten track, a mysterious untended bookshop that offers only books about serpents, one of which, ignorant of the price he deems to purchase.

Title story, Lost Estates, with its intimation of ungraspable worlds beyond our own feels a fitting choice for the collection’s title as the stories’ numinous qualities hint at, while never truly revealing, alternative planes. Each story feels rich in historical detail and suggestions of the supernatural and, within their ambiguity, there is much to enchant and contemplate.

Demons by Daylight (1973) was Ramsey Campbell’s second collection of short stories, following on from The Inhabitant of the Lake and Less Welcome Tenants (1964). Truth be told, I’ve never really got on with that debut; it’s cod-Lovecraftian prose puts me off. That said, it was an achievement for a sixteen year old. This second book is a different prospect, having discovered Vladimir Nabokov and Graham Greene, the still young Campbell changed his style wholesale.

The stories are split across both Campbell’s Liverpool, where psychological horrors abound and Brichester, the city at the heart of his take on Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos. Opening story, Potential, is firmly lodged in 1960s counter-culture, where a young man walks into a hippy gathering, and is befriended by another attendee who suggests another place that may be more to his liking. What begins innocently enough leads to horror of cosmic proportions. That it opens the collection suggests Campbell is flag-planting his territory with this new approach: the Lovecraftian influence remains, but the delivery is going to be different.

So different, in fact, that Campbell finds space among the stories for some meta-fiction, with The Franklyn Paragraphs, an enjoyable romp – and spin on the Lovecraftian mythos – with the author himself on the trail of missing novelist, Errol Undercliffe. The Interloper, a story purportedly by Undercliffe also appears. Lovecraft isn’t the only model as The End of a Summer’s Day, one of the collection’s standouts for me, brings Robert Aickman to mind. A short tale about a newly-wed couple on their honeymoon taking an excursion to a cave. It pulls the rug out from under the couple, with no explanation. Where the ending seems slightly innocuous, it gains from a further reading, where a throwaway line midway suggests a greater tragedy to come.

Such subtlety is part of Campbell’s trademark here; he’s not the type to hold readers’ hands in the dark. His narratives require patient ingestion and invite cross-referencing of details. The spaces between the narratives require their own level of consideration. With each reread they open up without ever fully revealing their hand. Campbell is so in tune with his characters’ psychological states that we are often never even sure if the horrors are real or tricks of the mind. With abrupt time jumps between paragraphs even linear narratives feel disorienting. Add to this particularly off-kilter perceptions, such as a bus “swallowing its queue” or, when a man wanders among trees (“branches wept on him”), and we have a constant sense of unease.

Some stories, despite reading them several times, are sadly baffling; too abstruse as to be fully satisfying. However, Concussion, a lengthy fantasy where an elderly man and a young woman on a bus have a week-long fling in the past is a gem that rewards multiple reads. It’s a sustained fever dream, flitting in and out of reality, memories, and other influences so that we are never truly grounded in what may be going on.

Though there are killers and ghosts, and even a take on garden gnomes in Made in Goatswood, nothing feels conventional. The Enchanted Fruit luxuriates in nature writing as a man takes from an unusual tree with consequences. The Sentinels looks to standing stone lore, and The Stocking is a grounded and nasty tale of office flirting, though its reference in The Franklyn Paragraphs arguably pulls it into Campbell’s wider mythos.

The most unusual thing about Demons by Daylight is how long, for a book less than two hundred pages, it took me to read. I found myself reading the stories over and over, searching for the key detail that would unlock the tale. Campbell’s stories feel dense, thanks to layers of detail and references, mostly literary and cinematic, but they do reward patience, mostly. Yes, the collection feels uneven, but this book is a young writer finding his new style. This year he’ll have been publishing books for sixty years, so it’s clearly served him well.

The titular abode of Sian Northey’s This House (2011, tr: Susan Walton, 2024) is Nant yr Aur, a solitary cottage somewhere in rural North Wales. As a young girl, Anna Morris was fascinated by the place, though she only ever got to see inside in her thirties when, by chance, the door was unlocked. Now she’s in her late fifties, both its owner and solitary resident. However, it wasn’t always that way as she got married to Ioan Gwilym, who was in residence that day over twenty years before, and together they had a son, Dylan.

When the novel opens, Anna has discharged herself from hospital after a fall (“Whisky was a new habit.”) into the comfort of Nant yr Aur. Her leg is in plaster and her mobility is somewhat hampered. Even though she sees herself as independent (“She didn’t need anybody”) she relies on the assistance of elderly friend, Emyr, who runs errands on her behalf, and his wife, Dora. It would be fair to say that little happens in This House because much of the events have already occurred. This is a quiet novel of processing the past to break out of the present.

Home from hospital Anna is immediately “feeling the house relax around her” but like the plaster cast on her leg, it’s really a restraint, only emotional. Nant yr Aur is a house haunted by its past, a place where grief is contained within its walls. There are offers to buy the house, although selling up is not worth consideration. One potential buyer, a young man called Siôn, seems able to slip under Anna’s usual defences, perhaps because the memories she’s holding on to are projectable onto him.

With a slim cast, each with their own secrets and lives beyond the house, Northey’s story is a relatively straightforward and sensitively drawn affair about breaking out from the routines of grief and grasping what life is left. It’s nicely observed, with time loss, hazy memories, and everyday tasks standing in for purpose. All as one may expect when an idyllic love story slips into a personal nightmare which gets more devastating as long-buried revelations are outed. But the book is not without some optimism. Once Anna walked into this house and chose to stay, but doors can work both ways.

Headshot (2024) is Rita Bullwinkel’s first novel, following on from her 2022 collection, Belly Up. It’s an exciting, somewhat experimental tale delivered in the structure of a boxing tournament for young women. Scheduled over two days sometime in the 21st century, we get chapters named for each fight, and these give us blow-by-blow accounts of the action and eliminations all the way to the final. For those of a certain vintage, it could be summarised as Rocky and Bullwinkel.

All jokes aside, the Rocky franchise does appear to impress on the characters. Where the first movie had Apollo Creed as victor, here we have the Greek god’s twin, Artemis Victor slugging it out for the win. Boxing cousins share their surname with Clubber Lang. Others come with the sort of main draw name that has gone from lights to legend. Though, while all these eight competitors have made it past regional finals to fight in the nationals, it’s all taking part in a spit-and-sawdust gym in Reno. It’s as unglamorous as boxing gets, with these girls watched, advised, and refereed by men, a mix of low-grade coaches and judges all with shattered dreams as its “a place to be in power”.

In the opening bout, Andi Taylor faces off against Artemis Victor. Where Victor, the youngest of “a Russian doll crescendo of sisters” is intensely focused, so as to be the best among her boxing siblings, Taylor’s mind is drifting, caught up in personal traumas. A boy’s red trunks and the blue rays of a television are like the corners of a boxing ring having their own conflict in her head. But these matches are just as mismatched as the girls slugging it out. At times they feel like conceptual opposites, though all ultimately doomed to mediocrity. In one fight a girl who resists the concept of being a good girl (“All a good boy has to do to be good is put on a clean shirt.”) while her opponent sees herself as just that.

As the girls exchange blows, we jump from one competitor to the other. Sometimes we see them living in the moment, focused on the fight at hand, though other times we are learning about them, their lives and hopes, as they go on to become typecast actors, wedding planners, and pharmacists. Like Muriel Spark with gloves on, Bullwinkel serves up a flurry of past, present and future without ever losing the thread of her narrative. This is because time doesn’t really matter here. The mornings and afternoons dissolve into the eight rounds of two minutes. 

Thanks to mouthguards, there’s very little dialogue beyond grunts, but Bullwinkel delivers characters in other ways, notably by deflating dreams and shattering illusions. Her prose is captivating, confident, and delivered more Sugar Ray than sugary. The style is punchy and at times repetitive, an exciting series of one-twos that’s a sustained barrage of both aggression and commentary. Though each challenge for the girls is the other girl before them, what they’re really navigating is life and societal expectations and learning lessons along the way, notably about picking themselves up from loss, as they move into adulthood.

There is a sense though, that having explored much of the girls’ lives in earlier bouts, there’s less to say in the later stages of the competition. The chapters become shorter, though this at times felt like a relief, to save it stumbling on like a defeated champ. Having lasted the duration, Bullwinkel goes for the knockout with a final chapter that wraps up the book and its whirl of themes. It felt more sucker punch than clean strike, but overall Headshot floats like a butterfly, if not quite stinging like a bee.

Fifty Forgotten Books (2022) by R.B. Russell is as enjoyable as browsing in a dusty old book shop on a rainy day. Much of the book mirrors that experience, as Russell, the protagonist, takes us back to these long gone places through a series of books that have shaped his literary lifetime, often verging on bibliomania. Along the way, it’s not just the places that are fondly recalled, but the idiosyncratic booksellers and collectors he befriended, each happy to slip a book into the author’s hand.

As he states in his introduction, the list provided here is “a personal recommendation of often overlooked and unloved novels, short story collections, poetry and non-fiction”, and they come not with concise summaries, but instead explore the value of the books, whether that be for their rarity, the literary history behind them, or purely sentimental reasons. Depending on who you are, some of these books have never been forgotten or maybe they’ve never been known about to forget, but most fall into “the less frequented byways of literature”.

For the most part, these byways are in the literary supernatural, which is not unexpected as Russell, along with his partner, Rosalie Parker, runs Tartarus Press, boutique publisher of such. Here he recalls the first meeting, in print, with Arthur Machen, hoping for existentialism in The Hill of Dreams (1907) and finding something greater. Tartarus would later publish plenty of Machen’s work, and along the way other writers like Robert Aickman (Russell is also his biographer), Denton Welch, and Sarban, the pen name of British diplomat, John William Wall, all of whom are represented.

While each chapter is dedicated to a specific book, they tend to follow the pattern of first discussing the work and its meaning to Russell then honing in on a slice of his life. Thus the book becomes a memoir just as much as it is a healthy helping of suggestions, showing the writer as a renaissance man, where the books he’s loved have led him, in addition to publishing, into writing fiction, translation, and musical composition. This life is intertwined with the books. The author happily talks of old publishers, first editions, author societies and dinners, and befriending other avid collectors and, in the case of Machen, his daughter, Janet.

Personally I’ve only read two of the books here – The Devil in the Flesh (1923) by Raymond Radiguet and The Tenant (1964) by Roland Topor – though I have copies of several more. It’s not a list for completists, as some of these are more than a little out of reach to the casual buyer. But each recommendation is invariably dripping with other titles to explore. There are a few Tartarus books, which may be seen as self-serving, but they clearly mean something to the author and nobody’s getting rich off limited edition hardbacks that sold out years ago.

Though a memoir, there’s practically a subplot running through the book as the character of Noel Brookes, a Brighton bookseller rumoured to be a spy, pops up in Russell’s journey. Other people mentioned, some known from their own artistic endeavours, like Mark Valentine and David Tibet, add pleasing texture. However, the occasional name drop of someone previously unannounced who will, most likely be unknown to those not in Russell’s circle, is at times distracting. 

As the works listed in Fifty Forgotten Books are recounted, it’s clear this is a tribute to the obscure and overlooked. There’s no denying that Russell is the epitome of bibliophilia. He doesn’t just read the works but delights in the world around them, the stories beyond them, the hunt for them in defiance of the internet, and the shared enthusiasm of those other travellers on the lonely byways. One may say that this book is an attempted rescue of such works.

The role of a waiter is to perform unseen, to serve people and, barring the occasional nod or small talk, to be both discrete and unmemorable. They must give nothing of themselves away while attending to those they assist. One who exemplifies this can be the perfect waiter of the title in Alain Claude Sulzer’s novel, A Perfect Waiter (2004, tr: John Brownjohn, 2008). In this instance, it’s Erneste, the embodiment of order and restraint, in both his professional and private lives.

Set in both 1930s and 1960s Switzerland, at a grand hotel, the book sees its later period shattered by the arrival of a letter from America harking back to the earlier time. The letter is from Jakob, a German man whom Erneste had, when they were in their early twenties, trained, shared a room with, and experienced his only true love. This at a time where the consequences of their relationship would have been disastrous.

But what is love for one person is but an indulgence for another as a sort of love triangle develops with the arrival of a well-to-do guest. Julius Klinger is a writer of great repute, tipped for the Nobel, and effectively a veiled Thomas Mann, who made a similar exodus with his family to Switzerland and then to America, escaping the increasingly perilous nature over the border in the Third Reich. Erneste’s life is shattered when he catches them in flagrante delicto.

As the titular waiter, Erneste embodies the many themes that swirl around in the novel’s two periods. By making himself vacant to those he serves, we see the effects of loneliness and keeping one’s identity hidden away. At a time where his homosexuality would be harshly condemned, his professional invisibility becomes a sad mirror of his own shattered hopes for sexual liberation. But with the addition of Klinger, the flirtation of class and power compound Erneste’s quiet agony as his lover’s attention shifts upward rather than remaining with his equal.

Sulzer’s prose is calm and meticulous, like his waiter, expertly guiding us back and forward between the two crucial decades. Though the narrator is omniscient, there’s something of the reserve and repression of Ishiguro’s Stevens (The Remains of the Day, 1989). It has plenty of memorable set pieces, such as the Erneste’s voyeuristic approach to Jakob being measured for his uniform or their first sexual encounter. But also more grim moments as queer-bashers exercise vigilantism and one character takes their life. 

With the Mann-like figure of Klinger, and his interest in Jakob’s handsome youth, it’s easy to view him, in reference to Mann’s Death in Venice (1912), as a Tadzio, the object of infatuation for a writer and the unspoken passion of Erneste. At the start of the book, when Jakob’s letter arrives, Sulzer gives us this passage:

“The past was locked away in his abundant recollections of Jakob like something inside a dark closet. The past was precious, but the closet remained unopened.”

That Erneste is unable to leave his past, or be himself is the novel’s core tragedy in a book replete with them. The journey from idealistic and professional twenty-something to middle-aged standard-bearer of lost time and regret is complete. But the perfect waiter handles this by remaining invisible, a shadow passing through life, serving the world unnoticed, and the importance of being Erneste is quietly lost.

After Sundown (2020) is the first from an annual non-themed horror anthology by Flame Tree Press. With no particular focus, editor Mark Morris has cast the definition of horror wide, ensuring that the stories presented offer a real mix. Sixteen of the twenty stories were commissioned by well-kent names in the field, meaning the remaining entries were from open submissions, though the four are not identified.

As openers go, C.J. Tudor’s Butterfly Island is a high-octane thriller in miniature. It brings a boatload of characters onto a mysterious tropical island and involves so many plot points in its seventeen pages that it’s hard not to feel like it’s the trimmings from some larger work. With bountiful sarcasm and comic stylings (“Kaboom!”) it never really won me over, but it at least set me up to be wrong-footed by the contributions that followed.

Tim Lebbon’s Research raised a smile by exploring the familiar idea that horror writers are nice because they expunge their darkness on the page. Here a writer is kidnapped and, prevented from writing, observed to see what happens. Another writer, in Ramsey Campbell’s assured Wherever You Look, discovers at a reading that his canon shows signs of being influenced by a short story he read as a child and no longer recalls. This sends him on a mission to read it once more and exorcise its influence, but its psychological effect drags him deeper into darker places. Allusive and perhaps somewhat autobiographical, it’s ultimately unsettling.

If Campbell’s story feels vague to some, then Catriona Ward’s A Hotel In Germany may be lost to many. It’s a deliciously odd study of love and servitude told through the relationship of Cara and ‘the movie star’. The ambiguity of Cara – petlike, sentient, obedient, and almost ageless – brings a whole layer of mystery to this seemingly symbiotic couple, and the world beyond the hotel, fleetingly glimpsed – is tantalisingly speculative. Similarly, Alison Littlewood’s Swanskin is another story wonderfully enclosed in its mythology. A slow-burn exploration of gender roles in a fishing village, it’s a spin on the swan maiden folklore that slips off its feather robe for a ghastly conclusion. 

Being horror, such endings are often anticipated. Simon Bestwick’s We All Come Home, a tale of one man returning to his childhood trauma, is a solid piece of writing though its conclusion has a sense of having seen it all before. The Mirror House by Jonathan Robbins Leon, the story of an unhappy marriage as a woman realises she’s a box-ticking exercise to her older husband is suitably creepy though its ending feels predictable. Ditto Murder Board by Grady Hendrix. Farcical and familiar, here a Ouija board leads to disaster when a message, interpreted in one way, is more ambiguous. It’s a pacy piece of plotting, but also surface-level stuff and rather forgettable. 

Any anthology is bound to contain some run-of-the-mill stories like that (admittedly, it’s all personal taste) and After Sundown is no exception. That’s the Spirit by Sarah Lotz is one such tale; the story of a fraudulent medium who may be regaining powers. It’s nicely character-driven but fairly conventional and, if it surprises, then it will only once. Thana Niveau’s Bokeh has a child acting strange with imaginary friends while processing her parents’ split. I thought its unusual representation of the fae in the shapeless unfocused regions of a photograph was great but overall it’s not a particularly interesting story.

But where some stories don’t deliver, others come out swinging. In The Importance of Oral Hygiene, Robert Shearman has one woman writing to another to warn her about the dentist she’s visiting. It’s a fun, tight, and grotesque piece of body horror set in the 19th century featuring a debauched indulgence in nitrous oxide. Stephen Volk’s The Naughty Step is a bleaker affair as a social worker arrives at a crime scene to help escort a young boy, banished to the titular step before witnessing his mother’s murder, and unwilling to leave without her permission. It’s devastating stuff, well-observed, and its characterisation oozes frustration, compassion, and trauma. More domestic horror is found in Michael Marshall Smith’s It Doesn’t Feel Right, which grows out of the most mundane of situations: a man getting his child ready for school each day and the kid fighting back at having to wear uncomfortable socks.

If socks don’t feel right, then I felt the same way about Laura Purcell’s use of a journal in Creeping Ivy to deliver the story. It’s a gothic story with its dilapidated manor, dead wife, uncanny botanics, and hints of madness. The entries just read like a regular narrative, despite an opening gambit that observes they supposedly get more scrawled as they go on, though those scribblings do produce a nice conclusion. Rick Cross, in his Last Rites for the Fourth World, opts for ending where he began in this matryoshka of a story, like a Cloud Atlas in miniature. Environmental in theme, I found it rather dull in its imagining an end to the current crop of folkloric entities. Similarly speculative, and with a more ambiguous apocalypse, was Michael Bailey’s Gave, which jumps back through the key moments of one man’s life as he gives blood to save humanity. It flows nicely but doesn’t provide much of a chill.

If giving blood voluntarily is horrific, then spare a thought for the cast of Lewis Carrol’s Wonderland in the sanguine pages of John Langan’s Alice’s Rebellion which opens with many of their heads on sticks. It’s an overtly political piece, a dark fantasy that imagines Tweedledee and Tweedledum having found power in our world. The blatant comparisons to two tousled-hair blonde leaders of the day feel, even just a few years later, dated. Its central theme is more universal in questioning revolutions, their martyrs, and who will rise from such sacrifices to make the world sensible again. But for some, such as the ghost in Angela Slatter’s Same Time Next Year, the world she haunts can never be sensible as its memory comes to her in incompatible fragments. Like her, we never really get to see her life in full, and can only speculate with the hints given, making it a nicely paced tale with room for reflection.

There’s reflection too in Mine Seven by Elena Gomel, as a woman comes to terms with her roots. But this is also an enjoyable creature feature, touching on climate change and natural resources, set in the icy desolation of Svalbard. It’s well done, in plot and pace. That the monster stalking the island comes from Chukchi folklore makes it an interesting and educational experience.

Boys of a certain age in 1970s Britain are likely to have had a different sort of educational experience when ‘mucky mags’ were passed around like currency. This rite of passage forms the backbone of Paul Finch’s Branch Line, which is half a coming-of-age tale and equally a ghost story. Delivered like an interview, recalling the time when one boy went missing, the interviewee tells his side of the story about his relationship with his old companion as they walked, Stand By Me style, along a railway line in north-west England. It’s a nostalgic piece and captures a somewhat lost era. And its ending is a fitting way to end not just the story but also this fun and varied collection.

The Scandinavian Star was a passenger ferry that, in the small hours of April 7th, 1990, went up in flames, killing 159 people. Generally considered an insurance job, given the dodgy dealings preceding the disaster, the finger of blame is still circling to this day. Though for all the accountability that may yet fall on individuals or government authorities, in Money to Burn (2020, tr: Caroline Waight, 2025), the first in her proposed Scandinavian Star septology, Asta Olivia Nordenhof identifies a more abstract antagonist: capitalism.

Nordenhof’s critique of laissez-faire economics surfaces around a third into the novel, brief but impactful. However, her alignment of the tragedy in human terms with her thematic concerns finds an oblique entry point in the lives of an older Danish couple, Kurt and Maggie, sometime in the late 80s. Kurt is an introvert, uncomfortable in his skin, but he has made modest steps in life, notably the founding of his small bus company in a bid to be his own boss. The novel mostly focuses on Maggie, whose earliest memory is of a wartime bunker, emerging, like the rest of the world, into a post-war economic boom. But the spoils of this growth appear thin on the ground. The struggles they face, financially and socially, play into the broader ideas of how systems can promise opportunity and yet fail to deliver: personal battles reflect the crushing of all the passengers’ lives in the larger mechanisms surrounding money.

Nordenhof’s omniscient narrator (presumably Nordenhof herself) jumps around her characters’ lives, forward and back. In short chapters, she delivers fractured vignettes that capture key moments in their stories. There’s a certain freedom to a young Maggie’s boarding of a train to Rome while penniless, but her initial blagging of hotels turns to brief relationships sees her accrue unbearable episodes. Through her early years, Maggie experiences homelessness, sexual abuse, and – (“A man’s face was a hole from which money could be drawn.”) – other humiliations. Though she survives it all,  years later she hopes her daughter, Sofie, will earn her own money and have no need of a man.

The man Maggie needs is, of course, Kurt. He’s a broken man, emotionally unstable, controlling, and, at this human level, the patriarchy. His own insecurities and disappointments fuel his ill temper, and assert his power. But when Nordenhof scratches at his surface, later in the book, we get to see another person harshly treated by life, another everyman in the grind of capitalist structures that own us, be that via banks, utilities, or marketing. By bringing the thematic concerns of the ferry disaster down to a personal level, Nordenhof is showing us the systems we live in and that everyone is exploitable and collateral, not only to the wealthier powers above them, but to each other. People aren’t affected for an idea: “In order for one group to profit, somebody and something else may have to die. That is the idea.”

Stylistically, Nordenhof’s prose is definitely poetic in its concise captures. Each paragraph stands alone, saying only what needs to be said. When accounting Kurt and Maggie, the narration is detached but still wrings out emotion from our natural empathy. And when pursuing its wider themes it’s positively charged, engagingly propulsive that sometimes it can come as a shock when a line appears that makes you stop and reflect, like “Money is a space that extends far beyond the capacity for pain.”

Its heartfelt anger at capitalism’s capacity to infect lives does warrant the question: what’s the viable alternative and how do we get there? Perhaps such answers will come in one of the further six titles, each listed out at the back of the book, with tantalising names like ‘Maria, Atlantis’, ‘Ideas 2’, and ‘Jørgen Is Scarified. For now, Nordenhof is highlighting struggles within its overarching structure. While Money To Burn is a standalone work, it’s an interesting beginning to what seems an ambitious project, wherever it may be headed.

A Journal (2020) by J.M. Walsh is an experimental account of April 2017 through to the end of March the following year. Each entry, though undated, is identifiable by a very specific constriction: the number of words should match the day in the month. Thus the first day must be a single word, the second day two words, and so on up to the thirty-first day.

What can be conveyed by a single word? The first entry is ‘Bird’, and we’re left to ponder what could be meant by this. Is a real bird being referenced, or something else? An illustration, perhaps. Things remain unclear – each day is new, after all – but more references to birds abound as the month unfolds with mentions of a hawk and a woodpecker, and “Dawn birds full of rumours: / giddy, indiscreet.”

As the months roll on, we start to see glimpses of the author’s life – friends; cats; an interest perhaps in churches; a comfort in music. At one point doubt creeps into the project. (“Is this project faltering? As engagement, it meets its book, but what fails is its soil: what muted emptiness you try to muscle pleasure from—“). This teasing out of a character from behind the often unrelated entries is vaguely reminiscent of David Markson’s Notecard quartet

What we really learn about the writer is his appreciation of the natural world, of being among it and feel the disappointment of a few days’ rain and being stuck indoors (“I have lost my connection to the outer world of nature.”). How the world is processed and presented is enjoyable: Broad beans’ “green skin, slick as eyelids“ and “flung rain” are nicely evocative. That the month of October is spent almost exclusively meditating on a spider and her web (“giant’s fingerprint”) shows that it’s not all random musings; the impressionist mode is cumulative.

Though there’s a steady progression through the year, it’s hard to call it a narrative. But the pleasure is in taking each entry and giving it room for consideration. Not every entry landed with me, but I certainly appreciate those that gave me insights or made me consider the world from a new angle, such as the restlessness of a hand (“At rest— what is it you’re not holding?”) or, having attended an avant-garde gallery (“I spoke to no one yet felt home.”).

Those passages that stir something are mere flashes in the arc of the book’s year. Some are perhaps too personal or too oblique to see the journal unfold easily to an outsider. But it’s an interesting mix of observations and admissions – of nature’s cycle; of human aging, respectively – that looks to multiple modes of expression, be that the poetry where doors “slam gunshot shut”, an impromptu haiku, or , in lines like “music can parse rain”, a ponderable observation.

Each entry, their potential expanding with each day, opens themselves up to this sort of experimentation, keeping things fresh as the journal progresses. And when the end of March approaches, as the experiment comes also to its conclusion, there’s a satisfying few days of reflection that assess the project itself and the spending of time. “Did you enjoy yourself? Walsh asks himself. His reply; “Less than half the time.” Can the same be said by myself? A little more, maybe; just about.

Withered Hill (2024) is the first foray into folk horror for David Barnett, having previously written, among other things, romantic comedies. One could wryly say this novel, drawing slightly on that genre, is where Bridget Jones has an appointment to keep with the Wicker Man. But beneath that fun comparison, is a surprisingly tightly-plotted book that delivers a multi-strand story with aplomb and keeps the reader engaged throughout.

Folk Horror, as a subgenre, is typically where ancient customs cling to the rural landscape; where an isolated outsider falls into the nightmare of superstitious tradition. The first chapter strays from that, opening in London on a boozy last bash with the girls. The chapter’s curious subtitles of ‘Outside’ and ‘Days to Withered Hill: 30’ suggest we have time to observe our outsider, thirty-two-year-old Sophie Wickham, the last woman standing from a group of settled-down friends.

Just as we’ve gotten to know Sophie, we’re already in Withered Hill. 357 days in! Here, in this strange woodland village somewhere in Lancashire, Sophie is told she can leave, a sentiment that chimes with the book’s opening sentence (“Everyone leaves eventually.”) — quite the curveball. And no sooner have we gotten used to this Sophie, the narrative switches timeline again to Sophie’s first day in the village, arriving naked and confused, guided in by residents wearing masks of pigs and hares.

Once settled into these changing timelines, the story becomes a delightful and suspenseful pagan braid, each strand overlapping the other in service to the whole. The mystery becomes not just how will Sophie get to Withered Hill, but how she will adapt to it once there, and how she will endeavour to leave.

There’s no denying that Withered Hill leans heavily into its plot-driven structure, offering a fast-paced thriller rather than any deeper journey. The prose is tight, functional, and streamlined, serving its suspenseful mode very well. The narrative is continually raising questions while the drip feed of what’s actually going on reveals nothing until it’s prudent to do so. All rather well done I think, given the three narrative strands’ potential to reveal earlier details.

At its heart the story is environmental, with the people of Withered Hill dismissive of those outside its influence. There, they follow the seasons in the old ways in service of a folkloric entity known as Owd Hob. In truth it often feels more folk fantasy than folk horror, but there’s definitely a few scenes that belong in the latter.

Barnett’s story is highly propulsive, for those willing to go along with it. There are times when certain elements – especially in the chicklit to conspiracy sections – where the plotting feels too visible and the characters too bare-boned in service of the plot. And other times in Withered Hill where the unhelpful villagers surrounding Sophie can get a bit repetitive in their unwillingness to directly assist. But overall it’s a dark popcorn, compulsively readable, mysterious, and leaves you craving more when it’s over.

The city of Dundee sits on the banks of the river Tay before it opens out into the North Sea. Once the city of jute, jam, and journalism, it’s now branded the City of Discovery, its fortunes having greatly improved since the millennium in terms of science and culture. But it’s not this modern Dundee that features in R.D McLean’s The Friday Girl (2025) – it’s a grittier incarnation; a city drowning in its post-industrial decline.

Detective Elizabeth Burnet is the titular Friday Girl. Having once done a newspaper feature in her police uniform (“Here’s a lass doing a job. Isn’t she pretty? See another one tomorrow.”) she’s the pin-up of the station. For a woman who “just wants to be polis”, it’s an awkward set-up at a time – the late 1970s – when sexism was rife and, if a woman was needed on a case it was “because someone’s got to make a cup of tea on this one!”. It’s likely no coincidence that this theme’s exploration is positioned the year before Margaret Thatcher would become the first woman to occupy the country’s highest attainable office.

But sexism isn’t the only rot in the Tayside Police: corruption is everywhere. Cops are on the take and investigations are mysteriously closed down. Burnet, with her hunches, is ignored and her partner in (solving) crime, Kelley, a second-generation copper, is convinced his late father may have secrets tucked away. All roads lead back to a local kingpin with enough sway to ensure the constabulary look the other way when crimes are afoot. And there’s certainly no shortage of misdeeds underway, whether that be a spate of robberies or the new wave of criminals being roughed up as Frank Gray, an ex-gangster once known as the Beast of Balgay, falls back into the game.

And what crime novel wouldn’t be without a killer on the loose? While it feels more secondary to the institutional concerns, it ties in with the wider story arc and doesn’t feel forced. Very loosely based on some unsolved crimes from Dundee’s past (the Templeton Woods murders) someone is out there killing people and with a calling card distinctive enough to earn the moniker ‘the Werewolf’. Being set in the 1970s, the investigation allows for some dramatic ironies (“What use was hair to anyone at a crime scene?”) and often sees a reliance more on feasibility and supposition than proper plodwork.

There’s a lot going on in The Friday Girl, all of it tightly plotted and delivered in a hardboiled style that feels frugal yet impressively distills people – their thoughts and movements – into just a few words.  With the economy of Elmore Leonard and the dark grit of David Peace, McLean is wrapping his noir over Dundee. Though the clipped style captures its characters well, it leaves the city somewhat less memorable, functioning more as a catalogue of places rather than a fully-realised character. But as is noted, “There’s the official public-facing city, and then there’s something like a shadow city where the real world happens.” and it’s what happens in these darker spots that truly counts.

Burnet’s efforts to be taken seriously as a detective rather than a woman provide a key journey through The Friday Girl, while Kelley tackles his father’s record and the interplay of Gray’s family life and criminal past lead to unexpected struggles of conscience. While I’m not sure if Burnet is intended to be an ongoing character, she’s certainly put herself in a position of competence meaning future investigations may not see being a “bubbly” beauty as a barrier to police work. “Dundee creates strong women,” the story says, and McLean has one in The Friday Girl.