After a year-long hiatus, we are pleased to announce the return of our book club.
Next up, we’re reading Laura Pashby’s Chasing Fog: Finding Enchantment in a Cloud, ‘a meditation on fog and mist’, accompanied by photographs capturing lands shrouded in otherworldly mists, and Pashby’s journeys into this most mythologised of weathers. Join the discussion in the new year, and expect an interview with the author.
Follow us on Instagram for a chance to win a copy.
How to Say Babylon by Safiya Sinclair – read by Elizabeth Kim
“What the tourists couldn’t discern, as they drank and ate dinner while my father sang and flashed his dreadlocks onstage, was his true motivation for singing. Night after night he sang to burn down Babylon, which was them.” Safiya Sinclair is a poet, and this is her memoir about growing up in a strict Rastafarian family, in the shadow of an abusive father who exploits a religious path without standardised framework. Sinclair has spun a mythology from her own life, and tells the story of how she found poetry as a means for distilling life’s hardships into something solid and beautiful. A thread of magic underpins the realism that gives it a sense of the universal. Reading this made me desperately want to write and read more poetry. The writing is beautiful and poetic while being clean—the author is not trying to impress but she does. This book is shortlisted for the Women’s Prize for non-fiction and I wouldn’t be surprised if it wins.
Prairie, Dresses, Art, Other by Danielle Dutton – read by Beth Ward
I first read Danielle Dutton's genre-bending collection Prairie, Dresses, Art, Other in a fever. The high heat of some phantom illness swirled in me as I wandered through the experimental prose—and I'm still not sure if it was my own febrile mind, or Dutton's glimmering, foreboding language that kept me in the trance-like state I found myself in for the whole of the book.
In the "Prairie" section, Dutton guides us through an uncanny American Midwest, where campsites exist in the shadows of their past as prehistoric ritual sites, where she incants the names of flora like a spell—"The woods are laced with prairie," she writes. "Sky blue aster. Sideoats grama. Little bluestem. Flowering spurge."—where Dutton finds herself haunted by the ghost of Mina Loy's poems and her own son's retelling of frightful urban legends.
"Would we call the moon a ghost,” she asks in one of the section’s shimmering essays, “or this a ghostly light?"
In “Dresses,” Dutton’s hybrid, nearly-prose poem, Sixty-Six Dresses I Have Read, suspends linearity in favor of the kind of otherworldly time that passes in a fairy tale, revisiting various dresses she’s encountered in works such as Jane Eyre, The Turn of the Screw, and Leanora Carrington’s White Rabbits.
In one meditation, in dialogue with poet CA Conrad, who created what they called (soma)tic poetry rituals, Dutton writes:
"After Mother
died her red
dress continued baking pies."
In another, written with regard to a play by Joyelle McSweeney:
"When they autopsied me,
I wore a white nightgown of malignant pearls
inside my body, as if I were a Queen that had swallowed my
own crown
or a demented bride with her own cake sewn up inside."
"Art" and "Other" give us more of this kind of experimenting with form and language. She considers art through fiction in a kind of academic ekphrasis, sends us off with a weird and whimsical one-act play.
My fever had broken by the time I finished Prairie, Dresses, Art, Other, but I stayed in Dutton's ominous surreality, the sing-song incantatory music of her prose clicking in my head, long after I'd left it. It is a book of high strangeness, uncanny beauty like light falling through leaves.
The Shadow Key by Susan Stokes-Chapman – read by Carly Stevenson
Hot on the heels of her acclaimed debut novel Pandora (2022), Susan Stokes-Chapman returns to the Georgian period in The Shadow Key—a suspenseful Gothic mystery set in a remote mining village on the Welsh coast. In keeping with the Gothic literary tradition, the rugged landscape provides a dramatic backdrop to the plot, which follows disgraced English physician Dr Henry Talbot and Linette Tresilian as they attempt to uncover the dark secrets of Penhelyg. The novel is steeped in Welsh folklore and the structure cleverly echoes the Four Branches of the Mabinogi—a nice touch that is testament to the author’s abiding affection for the country’s rich heritage. This is already one of my favourite books of 2024.
Dead Animals by Phoebe Stuckes – read by Elizabeth kim
“There is something creeping at the edge of your vision, lingering somewhere just out of focus. All it would take is to let your mind wander, to let it come into view.” Late capitalist existentialist literature might be my new favourite genre. I love Sally Rooney, and more recently I binge-read Madeline Gray’s Green Dot (though there wasn’t a grain of mythology, folklore, or the occult in there so I’ll talk about it at some point in a Substack post— subscribe here). Pitched to me as “It follows meets I May Destroy You” I jumped at reading this debut. While quieter than It Follows, and with less dread, Dead Animals is a tale of obsession laced with darkness. I resonated with the unnamed vegetarian woman protagonist’s struggle working in hospitality and the enigmatic shadow at the corner of her eye well summarised the feeling of living with trauma, in her case related to sexual abuse.
Poor Things by Alasdair Gray – read by Elizabeth Kim
I watched Yorgos Lanthimos’ sublimely weird black comedy before reading the book on which it is based. The book is different in feeling. For one thing, it’s set in Gray’s native Glasgow, which locals missed in the film. Controversial, but I’ve never taken to Glasgow (except its exquisite vegan pastries at Honeytrap Bakery and TheDorkyFrench) and I wanted to see it in a different light, through Gray’s dark urban realist lens—Ali Smith described Gray as a “modern-day William Blake.” A Victorian pastiche with echoes of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, and Robert Louis Stevenson’s Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, this is a postmodernist adventure novel with a female lead; it’s feminist and anti-colonial, satirical and at times a little didactic, but this suits the type of novel it is. It reminded me of Voltaire’s philosophical satire novel, Candide in places: “Only bad religions depend on mysteries, just as bad governments depend on secret police. Truth, beauty and goodness are not mysterious, they are the commonest, most obvious, most essential facts of life, like sunlight, air and bread. Only folk whose heads are muddled by expensive educations think truth, beauty, goodness are rare private properties. Nature is more liberal. The universe keeps nothing essential from us—it is all present, all gift.”
Threshold: Terminal Lucidity and the Border Between Life and Death by Alexander Batthyány – read by Elizabeth Kim
Threshold examines a phenomenon where people who’ve suffered dementia, Alzheimer’s, progressive brain disease, strokes or other mind-altering diagnoses often regain clarity and energy at the end of their lives, a miraculous return of the self with its memories and personality. Batthyány is a cognitive scientist and the director of the Viktor Frankl Institute and brings to this book Frankl’s existential psychology. This book examines how those who witness terminal lucidity come out changed, believing life is more meaningful, and that there is a core self which survives illness, and maybe even death. I found the stories here, and Batthyány’s insights, fascinating.
Our Share of the Night by Mariana Enríquez – read by Cristina Ferrandez
Juan and his son Gaspar are on the road, Gaspar’s mother’s death hanging over them as they make their way across Argentina. It is a long trip, or it feels that way; the prose is sprawling and painstakingly detailed. The reader feels firmly rooted in the realm of realism, privy to moments of tenderness between father and son as they mourn Rosario’s death. That is, until the supernatural abruptly seeps in, without notice or fanfare, as if it had always naturally been there. That is the power of Enríquez’s prose, the ability to imbue a story of mediums and demonic cults with such ordinariness that the horrors she tells feel ordinary too.
In Our Share of Night, Argentina’s military dictatorship and its many desaparecidos serve as backdrop, while the obscenely rich Bradford-Reyes family seek immortality through the Order, a cult dating back to 18th century Britain. Juan and Gaspar are, in fact, on no ordinary road trip, but on their way to the Bradford-Reyes’ aristocratic home, where Juan, a medium, must preside over the Order’s annual ritual, during which a supernatural entity called the Darkness will be summoned. For the rest of the novel, an increasingly ill Juan will do everything he can to keep Gaspar away from the Order.
Enríquez’s novel doesn’t shy away from classic horror tropes, such as haunted houses, and the monstrous creations of Rosario’s mother Mercedes, who kidnaps people and mutilates them until they resemble imbunches. But the novel also contains some of the most complex characters I’ve ever read. Juan’s trauma has turned him monstrous, and the only way to protect Gaspar is to physically hurt him. Meanwhile, back in the 70s, a young Rosario is torn between her instinct to protect her son and her desire for power within the Order. Our Share of Night is a disturbing yet immensely satisfying read, and a really refreshing take on the horror genre.
Cunning Folk: Life in the Era of Practical Magic by Tabitha Stanmore – read by Elizabeth Kim
I read every book about the service magicians from which we borrow our name. Stanmore’s introduction to this world is accessible and meticulously researched. Cunning-folk helped normal people with everyday problems, such as finding lost things, removing curses, fortunetelling, casting love spells and curing warts. They were, in a sense, practitioners of magic for the working classes. Their magic was not standardised in a formal doctrine. First they took their magic from fairies and animals; later they drew their knowledge from an array of books—grimoires popular around the time. This book is told like a series of narrative stories, far richer and more immersive than many other history books I have read which simply relay facts. Stanmore reminds readers that cunning-folk were not witches, though some met the same fate in the witch trials, a distinction that has been made by scholars such as Owen Davies and Thomas Waters, but which continues to be confused by many modern practitioners and writers of fiction. Professor Ronald Hutton—one of the world’s foremost experts on the history of witchcraft and paganism—called this “the best introduction to late medieval and early modern popular magic ever written.” Dr Stanmore teaches on this topic at the University of Bristol.
The Hemlock Cure by Joanne Burn – read by Sophia Adamowicz
As a child growing up on the outskirts of the Peak District, the history of how the plague came to Eyam, ripping through the quarantined village and killing around one-third of residents, was drummed into me from an early age. The Covid lockdown gave this local tragedy a new resonance, but nothing could prepare me for the power of Burn’s reimagining of Eyam’s history during 1665-66. The Hemlock Cure is a piece of historical literary fiction that feels utterly, painfully, real. Combining speculative elements—the story is narrated by the deceased sibling of the main character—with period detail, The Hemlock Cure explores fear, regret and absolution. It offers an inclusive vision of the family unit that lifts the heart whilst also breaking it.
Heart-Shaped Box by Joe Hill – read by Sophia Adamowicz
Late as always to jump onto the bandwagon, I downloaded the audiobook of Joe Hill’s 2007 novel recently, hoping for a good scare-fest. Heart-Shaped Box is certainly unnerving, a thrill ride of cinematographic sequences that feature one of the vilest ghosts in horror history. The protagonist, who adopts the name Judas Coyne and a lifestyle to match, can never quite be redeemed from his sins, no matter how much the narrative tries to shift culpability from him to the more overtly wicked characters. It makes for an interesting study in how to write unlikeable main characters while maintaining the reader’s interest in their fate. At one point, Jude charms his girlfriend by likening abused woman to vintage furniture, suggesting that distress increases value. While there is some irony in his tone, the story does reinforce this fetishising attitude by conflating female suffering with power. Jude’s saving grace is the love he bears for his dogs, which are presented more respectfully than many of the women in this problematic but nevertheless compelling novel.
The Anchored World by Jasmine Sawers – read by Sophia Adamowicz
Sawers’ collection of flash fiction is not only global in reach, but cosmic. Mining the rich seams of folklore and fairy tales from countries including Thailand, Denmark and Germany, Sawers sculpts her raw materials into delicate works of art. Earth still clings to the resulting creations—they deal with bloody rites of passage, sexual appetite, the rawness loss and failure—and this is what gives the universality which is the hallmark of both folklore and flash. I was particularly struck by the ethereal beauty of ‘The Weight of the Moon,’ a story about taking the time to rest, play and dream before returning to the gravity of everyday responsibilities.
The Camomile by Catherine Carswell – read by Maria Hummer
This novel is a largely forgotten gem from the 1920s about a young woman in Glasgow trying to find the right balance between pursuing her ambitions (she wants more than anything to be a writer) and doing what is expected of her. She faces religious pressure as well as the suffocating assumption from everyone, including her eventual fiancé, that a woman’s only purpose in life is to marry and raise children (which does not include writing and art). It is at once bleak and sublime (and also distressingly relatable for a book that was published over 100 years ago), and contains such passages as: “Today has been magical from the moment I woke. As I dressed I felt an exquisite fire running in my veins, and during breakfast I had to hold myself carefully and quietly in case I should fly to pieces from the sheer extremity of my aliveness to everything.” If you have ever felt overcome by “the marvel of life”, and especially if you have ever desired to put it to paper, you will find much to relate to in this book.
Welsh Witchcraft: A Guide to the Spirits, Lore, and Magic of Wales by Mhara Starling – read by Bw Bach
Wales holds a special place in my heart—my mother is Welsh, and many of my relatives live there still. Ever since I was small, traveling there to see my family always had the air of coming home; crossing the Severn Bridge from England into the green, rain-washed hills of Gwent came with an air of magic. And not without good reason—for Wales is a land of myth and legend, fairies and dragons, and it is notorious for its witches. And yet, despite its sorcerous repute, English books on Welsh witchcraft are scarce. It is precisely this scarcity that the enchanting Mhara Starling seeks to redress with Welsh Witchcraft.
The sparkling delight that Mhara takes in the vast mystical riches of Welsh culture shimmers from every page, creating what is a broad yet also deeply personal account of her craft. As a native Welsh speaker, raised on the Isle of Anglesey, Mhara has grown up in the storied landscape of the Mabinogi, and the fruits of that relationship are clear on every page. Welsh Witchcraft contains many treasures, not least authentic incantations in the Welsh language used by Wales’ cunning folk of days gone by. Containing a complementary blend of both theory and practical workings, it’s a fantastic introduction to the open and inclusive tradition of distinctively Welsh magic.
How to Be Animal by Melanie Challenger — read by Carl Holmes
How to Be Animal is an unsparing account of the author's journeys across historical, metaphorical, and endangered landscapes, some of which have been rendered desolate as a consequence of human exceptionalism. In vivid yet lucid prose, it asks the reader to address their complicity in the ongoing, accelerating erosion of biodiversity and species loss characteristic of the Anthropocene era. This text prompts a reconsideration of “the human” as being, in relation to the deeply ingrained but illusory, man-made binaries that construct the environment as a nonhuman “Other” in order to justify its exploitation.
Yellowface by R. F. Kuang – read by Elizabeth Dearnley
I’ve been wanting to read this since it came out this spring and it didn’t disappoint: I read this addictively twisty tale of publishing, literary theft, and white privilege in a single sitting. Narrated by struggling writer June Hayward, who steals an unpublished manuscript from her famous frenemy Athena Liu after the latter dies in a freak accident, Yellowface chronicles June’s increasingly gasp-inducing journey towards literary fame and its consequences. As brilliantly entertaining as it is snarkily satirical, this is my favourite book of 2023.
My Husband by Maud Ventura – read by Elizabeth Kim
“After the first months of enchantment, I observed, powerless, the merging of our lives, which only wound up distancing us more.” This isn’t a book about magic or the occult, but it is a darkly funny spell of a book. My Husband has been compared to Gone Girl, and for good reason. I tore through this slim novel, told from the perspective of an unreliable narrator who is obsessed with her husband—but of course, things are not quite what they seem. At once servile and manipulative, the besotted wife has, like Madame Bovary, a romantic notion of what married life should be like. My Husband sold over 100,000 copies in France and won the Prix du Premier Roman. My husband and R. F. Kuang’s Yellowface are my favourite novels of 2023.
The Art of Grimoire by Owen Davies – read by Elizabeth Kim
This beautifully illustrated history of grimoires, from one of the world’s foremost experts on the history of magic, reminds us that magic and the occult have always existed, throughout history and cross-culturally. Grimoires are pictorial and textual forms of magic—magical books—and function as records of magical knowledge, as well as instructing magicians on how to perform spells and rituals. The scope of this book is global, featuring the Cuneiform tablets from Mesopotamia, pages of Japanese demon encyclopaedias, Greek papyri and ancient Chinese bamboo scripts alongside the expected medieval European manuscripts. Put forward is a compelling argument for the inclusion of grimoires in art history: such books, writes Davies, “illustrate, quite literally, the human expression of fundamental desires, emotions, and fears in the form of demons, angels, spirits, gods, and abstruse symbols or abstract figures.” Davies introduces in accessible terms the main types of magic described, and reminds us that magic was once considered an art within the framework of the seven liberal arts, and continues to enchant creatives to this day.
Doppelgänger: A Trip into the Mirror World by Naomi Klein – read by Elizabeth Kim
Naomi Klein talks so much about her doppelgänger Naomi Wolf that I almost attributed this book to her. In the past few years, we’ve seen a boom in binary thinking, in part aided by social media and its algorithms and echo chambers. Here Klein considers what lies beyond, in the mirror world. Klein confronts both her personal “dark twin”—another author whom she has often been mistaken for who in recent years has espoused increasingly conspiratorial views—and the collective one, drawing from Jungian and Freudian thought and literary doppelgängers.
This is quite an esoteric cultural critique. Klein found in her doppelgänger the undesirable parts of herself and of shared culture, and saw more clearly “the dangerous systems and dynamics we are all trapped inside.” “Artificial intelligence is, after all, a mirroring and mimicry machine: we feed in the cumulative words, ideas, and images that our species has managed to amass (and digitise) over its history and these programs mirror back to us something that feels uncannily lifelike. A golem world.” She shows how liberals and progressives have missed the opportunity for debate and important conversations concerning issues such as lockdown and the covid vaccine, inadvertently defending the status quo in a bid to distance themselves from far-right conspiracy theorists; in neglecting such discussions we silence many demographics, including the disabled and BIPOC people, who have good reason to mistrust big Pharma. Thinking requires a conversation between two or more ideas that exist in ourselves. The branded self that exists so easily on social media is one-dimensional, non-thinking, and speaks in slogans. We define ourselves by saying who we are not. But for change to happen, Klein argues, we’d do well to eschew binary thinking and step inside the mirror world.
The Shining by Stephen King – read by Cristina Ferrandez
Shockingly, The Shining is the first Stephen King novel I’ve ever read, despite the many film adaptations of his work I’ve seen. Of course, it’s impossible to read the novel and not visualise Jack Nicholson and Shelley Duvall, and even more so the labyrinthine carpeted hallways of Kubrick’s Overlook Hotel. However, the novel offers something that the film, by definition, can’t; here we are inside of Jack Torrance’s head experiencing, step by step, his descent into madness.
King masterfully interweaves a number of apparently disparate elements to create the perfect storm for the events that unfold: Jack’s history of alcoholism, Danny’s psychic abilities (his “shining”), the ghostly presences left behind by the hotel’s unsavoury history… The fact that Jack is writing a play works as an excellent mirroring device; as Jack becomes increasingly unstable under the weight of his failure to become a great American writer, his perspective on his characters also shifts as he comes to see them as mirrors of his wife and son. You probably already know what happens next, but just in case I will spare you the spoiler!
Hagstone by Sinéad Gleeson – read by Elizabeth Kim
Gleeson’s debut novel is one of the most anticipated books of 2024 and I was excited to receive a proof in the post. Artist Nell joins a commune of women on a wild, rugged island. The islanders live alongside strange murmurings that seem to emanate from the island itself. This “wave-fucked” place with its “forest fern fuzz” and its “dank forest of mulch floor” and commune of women reminds me of the rural stretch of coast where I grew up. I am several chapters in and already captivated by the hauntingly beautiful writing and quiet mystery story. This is one to read in a cabin beside the sea with the rain pattering down on the sky roof; I am not reading it in such a place, but the elemental atmosphere is bringing me back to my childhood growing up in the West Country.
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, trans. Simon Armitage – read by Elizabeth Dearnley
As the nights grow darker and icier, I’ve been returning to this incandescently beautiful and strange medieval poem telling the tale of a mysterious green knight who rides into King Arthur’s court one winter’s night, axe in one hand and holly branch in the other. Challenging the company to a “Christmas game”—you cut my head off and next year I’ll cut off yours—he sets in motion an eerie chain of events that ends with Sir Gawain riding out into the wilds of the Wirral to meet his supernatural adversary. Simon Armitage’s translation, which echoes the alliterative verse of the fourteenth-century original, is a masterpiece in its own right. Arguably the original folk horror, this one’s best enjoyed by candlelight on a snowy moonlit night.
Scotland the Strange: Weird Tales from Storied Lands, ed. Johnny Mains (British Library 2023) – read by Elizabeth Dearnley
This sumptuous purple hardback just arrived in the post and I can’t wait to get properly stuck in. The latest offering in the British Library’s hardback horror series, this volume contains a feast of weird tales from both well-known Scottish writers like Robert Louis Stevenson and John Buchan, and less familiar names such as Eliza Lynn Linton and Mrs Campbell of Dunstaffnage (who penned the evocatively titled ‘The Stag-Haunted Stream’). The book looks stunning as well, with its iridescent foiled cover glittering enticingly—definitely one to add to your spooky folklore collection.
This Ragged Grace by Octavia Bright – read by Beth Ward
This Ragged Grace is a book lacking any overt magic or mysticism—as far as the more literal definitions of those words—though in its opening pages we do meet author Octavia Bright in “that superstitious realm—the age of 27,” on her knees before a makeshift altar.
“…each morning it was that introspection I strove for,” she writes, “in front of my altar, kneeling to prove that I meant it.”
But there is something enduringly haunted in this story, one chronicling Bright’s personal journey out of alcohol addiction, and the harrowing and otherworldly mirror narrative of her father’s descent into Alzheimer’s. As Bright orients herself in this new place of remembering wrought by her abstention from drinking, her father begins to forget, his sense of self glitching into dissolution.
I felt haunted when I finished it, and I’m haunted by it still—by the beauty and dawn-like clarity of the prose, and by the way Bright renders so tenderly on the page that portal place, that gossamer-thin veil barely separating sobriety and addiction, loss and recovery, life and death, the ephemerality of memory and the inevitability of forgetting.
Bunny by Mona Awad – read by Dr Elizabeth Dearnley
I picked up this book after a tipoff from one of my students and absolutely devoured it. Set in an elite MFA programme ruled by a beautiful, pastel-clothed clique of girls who call each other “bunny’”, this hallucinogenic fairy tale of dark academia is laced with cupcakes, cocktails, human-animal hybrids, and some bloodthirstily unorthodox approaches to creative writing.
Deadly Words: Witchcraft in the Bocage by Jeanne Favret-Saada – read by Carl Holmes
This obscure, profoundly immersive, and genuinely disquieting book explores the often devastating consequences of what is said and, as importantly, unsaid in the context of a “peasant” witchcraft tradition in a remote region of France. Favret-Saada, a French anthropologist, was critical of orthodox academia's dry and distanced methodology, scorning the so-called neutral observer as a “non-combatant” in a “total war waged with words.” She came to believe that the only defensible approach for the resolute researcher was that which risked self-annihilation in surrender to witchcraft. This led to her becoming an “unwitcher” a magician at the service of those caught at the intersection of misfortune and “deadly words.” There is a real sense of lived experience in these pages, of secret things deliberately left unwritten.
The Book of Frank by CAConrad – read by Elizabeth Kim
Earlier this year, people crowded inside a warehouse in a Glaswegian suburb, warming their hands with paper cups of tea. They were all here to see CAConrad, a poet hailing from Kansas City, who described their childhood selling flowers on the roadside and later witnessing their friends die from AIDs in the 80s. CA wasn’t here to read from the somatic rituals for which they are best well known today, but from The Book of Frank, soon to be reissued by Penguin, but currently printed beautifully by Wave Books. I expected to hear an excerpt but we were treated to a reading of the entire book. This is a weird story in verse about Frank, a character who came to the poet and haunted them for more than a decade. CA’s verse is accessible and engaging. They blew bubbles to signal moving between parts and drew laughter from the audience on many occasions. Little wonder there was standing room only.. After reading, the poet described their belief that the poet is a vessel for poetry, a belief that goes back to the times of Homer. CA is a regular contributor to Cunning Folk and contributed to Spiritus Mundi; after the event, CA gifted me the reading copy of The Book of Frank – thank you!
The Bleeding Tree by Hollie Starling – read by Elizabeth Kim
Blending memoir, cultural analysis, and folklore, here is a personal tale about a subject often relegated to the realm of taboo: suicide. The author’s father’s suicide, to be exact. Uncannily similar in themes to the novel I’m working on, I have to be honest, when I received this proof in the post, I let it jump the line – setting aside the piles of ARCs waiting to be read. The connection between trees, folklore, and suicide is more subtle than I expected, but above all, I resonated with the author’s thoughtful meaning-making by examining her own lived experience and grief through the lens of folklore and the natural world. Suicide is taboo, but arguably this doesn’t help the thousands of people it impacts from grieving or accessing help. I would recommend it and have recommended it, to anyone going through something similar.
Pagans by Ethan Doyle White – read by Elizabeth Kim
Pagans are a tricky demographic to pin down. Today the term is used often to refer to Neo-Pagans, including Wiccans and Druids, whose new religions creatively draw inspiration from the past. The word “Pagan” has older roots, too, referring to various peoples, contemporary and historical, who worship(ped) not one god but many, from the Ancient Greeks to Hindus. Doyle White has done a good job of exploring the breadth of a slippery word that’s so often misconstrued. While dispelling myths, this is also a visual resource for many Modern Pagans, providing an accessible glimpse into the history, with references to various deities, shrines, symbols, festivals and more. The book is also illustrated by beautiful photographs and paintings, and produced to high standards, as we’ve come to expect from Thames & Hudson. We’re lucky to be running a giveaway on this title in April. Keep an eye on our socials for a chance to snag a copy!
Too Hot to Sleep by Elspeth Wilson – read by Elizabeth Kim
Bedridden for a few months now, I have really enjoyed dipping in and out of poetry collections. Too Hot to Sleep is Elspeth Wilson’s debut pamphlet, and proved short and engaging enough to read in one sitting. Described as a book that “explores the way we inhabit our bodies from the perspective of a queer, disabled, neurodivergent artist”, it felt apt reading for me right now. Wilson’s poetry is very much a vibe. The tight and spare poems are nostalgic and harken back to an easier time: 90s sleepovers, supernatural pop culture including vampires and witches, all set against the bleak backdrop of the ongoing climate crisis, with wildfires ripping across countries. Come along to the launch at Lighthouse Books in Edinburgh on 11th May.
Uprooted by Naomi Novik – read by Dr. Elizabeth Dearnley
I can never resist a forest-set fairy tale (especially if Baba Yaga is involved), and Uprooted charts a bewitching path through the woods from start to finish. Telling the story of Agnieszka, who is taken from her village to serve a formidable dark wizard known as the Dragon, this spirited take on Beauty and the Beast weaves together Polish folklore, gorgeously tactile spells made from rosemary and lemon, a determinedly resourceful heroine, and trees with minds of their own.
Her Body and Other Parties by Carmen Maria Machado – read by Cristina Ferrandez
Carmen Maria Machado’s memoir In The Dream House was one of the most talked about books of 2019 with its deconstruction of genre and exploration of abuse in queer relationships. But before In The Dream House, Machado published Her Body and Other Parties, a groundbreaking collection of feminist short fiction. The collection includes stories ranging from ‘Especially Heinous’, a reimagining of every episode of Law and Order: SVU which grows gradually more and more absurd, to ‘Real Women Have Bodies’, in which a strange plague makes women slowly fade away until their flesh is barely visible. The most striking story, in my opinion, is “The Husband Stitch”, a collage of urban legends and some of the horror stories that have kept generations of us awake at night, all retold in an attempt to make sense of the relationship dynamics between a woman and her husband. Machado subverts these stories to explore contemporary gender issues such as female desire, toxic masculinity, and consent. The effect is visceral and revelatory and the short story remains one of my all-time favourites.
The Witch Doll by Helen Morgan – read by Dr. Elizabeth Dearnley
This shivery children’s book about two girls who find a small wooden doll – and make the unwise decision to fit it with the blonde wig of hair found next to it – terrified me as a child. Returning to it recently while researching doubles and doppelgängers, I found Morgan’s story (and the book’s horrifying half-doll, half-human cover design) to be just as chilling as I remembered.
Haunted Bauhaus by Elizabeth Otto – read by Carl Holmes
The Bauhaus school of art and design is often synonymous with modernism and “male” gendered abstract rationalism: a minimalist aesthetic of hard edges and pared-down functionality. In the wittily titled Haunted Bauhaus, Elizabeth Otto “queers” this view by highlighting the fluid, irrational and anti-utilitarian approaches taken by the more bohemian members of the school, whose receptivity to occult spiritualities and radical currents in politics and philosophy found expression in lifestyles that actively sought to subvert gender, sexuality, and identity norms. Standard narratives tend to ignore or gloss over the ghosts that trouble the Bauhaus brand, binding and banishing them to the margins; with Haunted Bauhaus, Otto performs a timely resurrection.
Judas Goat, Poems by Gabrielle Bates – read by Beth Ward
This debut collection of poems by Gabrielle Bates is about intimacy. It's about place, the way it haunts us and makes us. It's about bodies and obedience. It is about mothers and daughters. Touch, death – each of its poems glimmering with a kind of harshness, an incisiveness, Bates' verses like knife blades against soft petals.
In the collection's opening poem, "The Dog," Bates gives us lines so clear and evocative as to be nearly tactile.
"When we went to bed, I stared at the back of his head
split between compassion and fury. My nails
gently scratching up his arm, up and down, up and down,
the blade without which the guillotine is nothing."
These from "When Her Second Horn, the Only Horn She Has Left," are so tender and taut that the reader can nearly feel the line breaks against her own wrist.
"When her second
horn, the only horn she has left,
goes up through the white and copper-topped
tunnel of my eye and enters the basket of bone,
we are no chimera the ancients ever dreamed."
Judas Goat's poems are brutal and beautiful. They're the kind of poems that your body reads, that resonate somatically, that are felt before they're learned. Bates took me somewhere in these poems that I still haven't come back from.
The Unknown: Weird Writings, 1900-1937 by Algernon Blackwood – read by Elizabeth Kim
Algernon Blackwood is a writer more of us should know about, suggests Henry Bartholomew, the editor of this short story collection. A contemporary to Arthur Machen and WB Yeats, Blackwood was one of the foremost British writers of horror and ghost stories, and his early work was admired by young writers including H P Lovecraft, C S Lewis, and JRR Tolkien. Blackwood drew creative inspiration from his love for mountain climbing and skiing, while his more metaphysical leanings borrow heavily from his interest in Buddhism and the occult. A founding member of Toronto’s Theosophical Society, the author was also a member of the Ghost Club, and the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. The twelve stories and essays in this collection are full of dread and wonder, hinting at the immensity of the unknown forces that lie beyond what we think we know. I am still reading this, slowly, but one of the most representative and well-known stories in the collection is “The Glamour of the Snow”; eerily it begins with a line that promises nothing is quite as it seems: “Hibbert, always conscious of two worlds, was in this mountain village conscious of three.”
The Subversive Stitch: Embroidery and the Making of the Feminine by Rozsika Parker – chosen by Beth Ward
In The Subversive Stitch, Rozsika Parker explores with depth, clarity, and care the historical, reciprocal connection between cultural ideas of femininity and womanhood and the art of embroidery. She removes embroidery from its fusty context as a docile, grandmother-ly craft, and reminds readers of its mystical, ancient roots, of its use as a revered form of devotional art, and as an avenue for liberation for women bound by the oppressive gendered dictates of their time. Parker interrogates the near-magical duality of embroidery as an artform. Often employed by fathers, husbands, and male authority figures as an activity to keep women and girls submissive, quiet, and still, it instead became a catalytic tool for subversive storytelling, cultural movements, and social justice reform. The Subversive Stitch reminds us that a needle in the hands of the marginalized is as powerful as a pen, as a sword, and that it's been wielded in subversive and progressive ways since the time before time.
In a Glass Darkly by Sheridan Le Fanu – chosen by Sophia Adamowicz
While the sapphic vampire classic, Carmilla, has long captured the Gothic imagination, fewer readers may be familiar with Le Fanu’s tales of evil spirits. The volume, In a Glass Darkly, is presented as a selection of curious cases from the correspondence of Dr Hesselius, a physician with an interest in the “interior sense.” The multiple framing devices prove something of a barrier to enjoyment at times, but Le Fanu excels in portraying the relentless pursuit of demonic presence. A standout story is “Mr Justice Harbottle,” which centres around a corrupt judge with a penchant for “dubious jollifications”. After condemning a man to death for his personal gain, the judge is put on trial by a group of ghastly apparitions. Fans of M.R. James would particularly relish Le Fanu’s haunting descriptions.
ECODEVIANCE: (Soma)tics for the Future Wilderness by CAConrad (2014) – chosen by Elizabeth Kim
I have been a huge fan of CAConrad's work for years now, and forever grateful to include their work in our print magazine, as well as in Spiritus Mundi. I'm glad I didn't read ECODEVIANCE while commissioning and writing essays for SM; this poetry collection has a similar structure, but it's different in that it's a personal documentation of ritual and process. The poet describes rituals and then shares several poems that came out of these rituals. ECODEVIANCE is collaborative and pioneering and magical. These rituals helped bring CA back into their present moment and body and they may help readers find a new way to navigate the world. CA has said on Instagram they feel their poems in their bones and I feel them in mine, too. CAConrad is one of the best living poets.
Strange Relics: Stories of Archeology and the Supernatural, 1895–1954, Edited by Amara Thornton & Katy Soar – chosen by Jim Peters
With my past life as an archaeologist—and current role in museums—stories that deal with unearthing forgotten horrors always appeal to me and this short story collection does not disappoint. Featuring some well-thumbed stories, as well as introducing a few new names to look out for, this is a wonderfully curated collection whose artifacts would make a fascinating exhibition. Expect time-shifting binoculars, magical statuettes, cursed buildings and stonework, Roman remains, barrows, and tiles dripping in references to ancient beliefs, Gods, and religion. I love that even though I was familiar with several of these tales, they sat in a slightly different light being presented as archaeological stories amongst their own kind— for me that is always the mark of a really well-put-together anthology. Amara Thornton and Katy Soar have chosen a great variety of stories that read so well together accompanied by well-informed and useful notes and introductions.
The Dark Earth of Albion by Gareth Spark – chosen by Jim Peters
Plastic Brain Press is a creative and mind-expanding enterprise putting out collections of short stories and poetry that dabble into the dark side with a lysergic sense of the surreal—The Dark Earth of Albion is no exception. The individual stories in this collection of 13 short tales reveal a multitude of characters and nightmare-tinged settings from various moments in this land’s dark and twisted past, present, and maybe even our future. The disassociated, outsider feel of these tales is as potent as their link to some mysterious ancient invocation of the earth. Spark turns his hand to desolate industrial estates, wartime nightclubs, remote coastal villages, and muddy woodland clearings telling tales of abduction, apocalyptic survival, ancient rituals, Norse raids, biker gangs, and polar bears in Whitby. What carries through all of these short stories and briefly glimpsed vignettes is Spark’s delightful and delicious use of language. The words linger. There are no dark and satanic mills here. Instead, you are left with the impression that every mill is dark and satanic—or has the potential to be. The same goes for every cottage, wooded glade, derelict building, rain-darkened moor, and swollen brook.
The Courage to Create by Rollo May – chosen by Elizabeth Kim
Existential psychologist Rollo May comes from a similar school of thought to Viktor E Frankl, author of Man's Search for Meaning. May’s ideas about the importance of art and imagination for helping shape and create new worlds, and positioning the artist as a rebel and saint, felt validating. He draws on myth and warns of the antagonistic force of dogmatism to artistic process: “Dogmatism of all kinds--scientific, economic, moral, as well as political—are threatened by the creative freedom of the artist. This is necessarily and inevitably so. We cannot escape our anxiety over the fact that the artists together with creative persons of all sorts, are the possible destroyer of our nicely ordered systems.” He emphasises that much of what is worthy of being considered art will not be recognised as important in its time, but will potentially be seen as dangerous. His conception of the artist as a softly spoken—and sometimes neurotic—person willing to pull apart the seams of modern life stands in contrast to the modern conception of the artist as something akin to a salesman. “Creative people, as I see them, are distinguished by the fact that they can live with anxiety, even though a high price may be paid in terms of insecurity, sensitivity, and defenselessness for the gift of the ‘divine madness,' to borrow the term used by the classical Greeks. They do not run away from non-being, but by encountering and wrestling with it, force it to produce being. They knock on silence for an answering music; they pursue meaninglessness until they can force it to mean.”
The Language of Flowers, (1971 reprint) compiled and edited by Mrs.L.Burke – chosen by Jim Peters
While working on a story that requires me to know why certain trees or plants were planted, I turned to this old favourite. Listing a full alphabet of 680 plants alongside corresponding moods, thoughts, and feelings, the book enables you to help plan your coded floral presentation. Here is the charming introduction from the later reprint of this Victorian classic: "To express gratitude or affection by the gift of flowers is common enough, but nowadays few people make use of the opportunities provided by this pleasant custom to express other and more specific sentiments. For instance, how nice (and delightfully simple) to be able to express one’s constancy with a bunch of Bluebells, or to declare war with a spring of Wild Tansy!”
The Wolf and the Woodsman by Ava Reid – chosen by Alex Epshtein
We seem to be in the age of retellings. Every time I enter a bookshop there is another rewritten and novelised myth. Whether it’s Greek, Norse, or Egyptian, the characters are familiar and comforting and the plot is often nostalgic; naturally, we are all drawn to those memories of childhood fondness. However, it is not often that I come across an accurately told story of Eastern European folklore, so I was surprised to stumble upon Reid’s The Wolf and the Woodsman. Drawing from Jewish mysticism and Hungarian folklore, this story follows a powerful young woman and ever determination to not only survive but live and thrive, in defiance of the tyranny that has encompassed her village. We follow her through the woods and she learns of the magical powers that hold her people hostage, and the powers that have the potential to liberate them. too. Reid’s debut is a stunning story, one enriched by a culture that’s rarely spoken about in mainstream media. I couldn’t put this book own. Now I too understand why people are so drawn to retellings. After all, as Reid eloquently writes in their book, “Stories are supposed to live longer than people.”
Mycophilia: Revelations from the Weird World of Mushrooms (2011) by Eugenia Bone – chosen by Dr Elizabeth Dearnley
This autumn I’ve been attempting to learn more about identifying fungi, and have returned to a fascinating book recommended by a former student: Eugenia Bone’s delicious deep dive into the world of mushrooms and mushroom-hunters. Charting her initiation and adventures with mycological societies, fungi festivals, and mushroom enthusiasts around the world, alongside exploring the myriad ways in which fungi intertwine with all other life forms on earth, Bone’s infectiously enthusiastic and highly informative book will leave you salivating for truffles and morels and give you a fresh appreciation for fungi in all its weird and wonderful forms.
The Island of Missing Trees by Elif Shafak – chosen by Alex Epshtein
‘To immigrants and exiles everywhere, the up-rooted, the re-rooted, the rootless and to the trees we left behind, rooted in our memories.’ - Elif Shafak, The Island of Missing Trees
As implied by her dedication, Shafak’s The Island of Missing Trees is an ode to what people call “home”. She writes about a young girl who grew up in Cypress, watching her dad nurture a fig tree in his garden. As the book progresses, the fig tree grows with her, from sapling to adolescence, its roots growing deeper and deeper into the ground as time goes on, until there comes a time to relocate. With this relocation comes war, loss, and pain. But there also comes hope, growth, and most importantly: love. Shafak explores all these emotions and events masterfully, through the eyes of those who experience them, and from the perspective of the fig tree, who has been there through it all.
Letters of Fire and Other Unsettling Stories (1984) by Adèle Geras – chosen by Dr Elizabeth Dearnley
A recent project on uncanny dolls has led me back to this unbelievably creepy children’s book that made a lasting impression on me as a horror-loving child. Containing tales of vampiric music teachers, haunted television cameras, and an eerily beautiful child who may or may not have been made from stolen pieces of other girls’ dolls, this collection is every bit as unsettling as I remembered.
Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury – chosen by Sophia Adamowicz
Bradbury’s vision of a culture numbed into submission by censorship of intellectual debate and book burning is a masterpiece of the dystopian canon. It crackles with nightmarish creations like the Mechanical Hound, a spider-legged robot that sniffs out dissenters and injects them with anaesthetising drugs. Ultimately, though, the book ends on a note of bittersweet hope, leading us to a society of outcasts who act as a living library. While some of the characters’ dire warnings may not chime harmoniously with this historical moment, the vivid imagery and fluidity of Bradbury’s language make Fahrenheit 451 a mesmerising exploration of intellectual freedom.
Heroes and Villains by Angela Carter – chosen by Cristina Ferrandez
Angela Carter’s trademark interplay between the familiar and the strange, the enchanting and the horrific, is in full force in this lesser-known novella from 1969. Heroes and Villains, like a lot of Carter’s work, draws from fairy tales and their tropes, which she subverts with a flourish. It is not entirely clear who the heroes and the villains are, but the reader follows young Marianne as she navigates a post-apocalyptic world and the resulting dangers, desires, and gender dynamics, all written in a prose that drips with sensuality.
The Leviathan, Rosie Andrews – chosen by Sophia Adamowicz
In his notorious political work of 1651, Thomas Hobbes uses the leviathan as a symbol of the state, wherein individuals sacrifice personal freedoms in exchange for protection by a sovereign power. Andrews’s novel takes this symbol and literalises it; the leviathan becomes an invasive creature that rears its head at times of political discord and prophesies the end of days. The narrative twists and turns, slipping out of the reader’s grasp. What begins as a story of witch-finding in the English Civil War transforms into a meditation on the relationship between myth and history.
Wake, Siren: Ovid Resung by Nina MacLaughlin – chosen by Beth Ward
Wake, Siren by Nina MacLaughlin takes the old myths readers are so familiar with and defamiliarizes and disorients us in a stunning, irreverent, ferocious retelling centering a chorus of female voices. We hear Daphne's voice, Arachne's, Medusa's, Hecuba's, the Sirens and others, their stories pouring from their own mouths, not Ovid's. MacLaughlin gives them back to us. In the opening tale—Daphne's, whose father transformed her into a laurel tree to save her from an attempted rape by Apollo--Daphne speaks directly to us: "Open the cabinet. Move the cinnamon. Move the nutmeg. Move the coriander, the cardamom pods, the cumin, the cloves...There, the small jar with whole leaves the length of your pinky. Those are me, mine. I was the first of all laurel trees...But the way you know me now, I wasn't always this way. When I was young and in a different form than this, I kept what I understood quiet, but I understood so much."
In one summary of the book, it's written, "seductresses and she-monsters, nymphs and demi-goddesses, populate Ovid's Metamorphoses. But what happens when the chase is tracked in the voice of the quarry? When the maiden coolly returns the seducer's gaze? When monstrous transfigurations come sung by those transformed?" MacLaughlin gives these answers to us in language, in prose that crackles, and fires, and shimmers, and sings. I could not have adored this book more.
Folk by Zoe Gilbert – chosen by Cristina Ferrandez
Folk is a wondrous mosaic of narratives all centred around the inhabitants of a village named Neverness. Gilbert skillfully weaves together a multitude of stories about the people, their traditions, and the momentous events of their lives, building up a picture of a place where the uncanny lurks around every corner. Neverness feels like a place taken straight out of our collective unconscious; there are echoes of folkloric traditions that may be familiar to the reader, but the resulting stories are singular and strange. Gilbert’s prose is masterful and the book is a joy to read.
What is Paleolithic Art? by Jean Clottes - chosen by Elizabeth Kim
Where did we come from, and where are we going? Art has sought to answer this question before the written word. In the occult, people often look to lineage narratives to determine the credibility and merit of various practices and beliefs. But it is perhaps in the earliest art we find something primal and shared. Jean Clottes is one of the world’s leading experts on cave paintings. This book puts forward a compelling scholarly argument for a shamanic origin of these strange paintings of animals, geometric patterns, and designs. One cannot help but re-evaluate anthropocentric ideas about the world when confronted by the shadowier pantheons inhabited by these early artists, that centred on the nonhuman as much as the human.
Witchbody: A Graphic Novel (2019) by Sabrina Scott – chosen by Dr Elizabeth Dearnley
This gorgeous, tactile, risograph-printed book explores and celebrates the magic hidden in everyday things, from coffee cups to computer cables, as well as exploring the relationship between human and nonhuman worlds in magical practice, and warning against the human exceptionalism which creates ecological crises: “Denying the meaning, materiality and agency of bodies that do not take human shape has been one of the biggest human contributions to environmental crisis.” Scott’s sinuously sensuous illustrations swirl her narrative together into a thought-provoking and energising meditation on witchcraft, the body, and the importance of magical collaboration.
Source: Anna Eliza Bray, A Description of the Parts of Devonshire Bordering on the Tamar and the Tavy, 1836, vol. 2, pp. 170–75.
narrator: Unknown, Devon.
type: III ML8005 ‘The Soldier’s Return’.
I
One day whilst Sir Francis Drake was playing at the game of Kales on the Hoe at Plymouth, it was announced to him that a foreign fleet (the Armada, I suppose) was sailing into the harbour close by. He showed no alarm at the intelligence, but persisted in playing out his game. When this was concluded, he ordered a large block of timber and a hatchet to be brought to him. He bared his arms, took the axe in hand and manfully chopped up the wood into sundry smaller blocks. These he hurled into the sea, while, at his command, every block arose a fire-ship; and, within a short space of time, a general destruction of the enemy’s fleet took place in consequence of the irresistible strength of those vessels he had called up to ‘flame amazement’ on the foes of Elizabeth and of England.
II
The people of Plymouth were so destitute of water in the reign of Queen Elizabeth, that they were obliged to send their clothes to Plympton to be washed in fresh water. Sir Francis Drake resolved to rid them of this inconvenience. So he called for his horse, mounted, rode to Dartmoor, and hunted about till he found a very fine spring. Having fixed on one that would suit his purpose, he gave a smart lash to his horse’s side, pronouncing as he did so some magical words, when off went the animal as fast as he could gallop, and the stream followed his heels all the way into the town.
III
The good people here say that whilst the ‘old warrior’ was abroad, his lady, not hearing from him for seven years, considered he must be dead, and that she was free to marry again. Her choice was made – the nuptial day fixed, and the parties had assembled in the church. Now it so happened that at this very hour
Sir Francis Drake was at the antipodes of Devonshire, and one of his spirits, who let him know from time to time how things went on in England, whispered in his ear in what manner he was about to lose his wife. Sir Francis rose up in haste, charged one of his great guns, and sent off a cannon ball so truly aimed that it shot up right through the globe, forced its way into the church, and fell with a loud explosion between the lady and her intended bride-groom.
Iv
The story says that whilst he was once sailing in foreign seas he had on board the vessel a boy of uncommonly quick parts. In order to put them to the proof, Sir Francis questioned the youth and bade him tell what might be their antipodes at that moment. The boy without hesitation told him Barton Place (for so Buck-land Abbey was then called), the Admiral’s own mansion in his native county. After the ship had made some further progress Sir Francis repeated his question, and the answer he received was, that they were then at the antipodes of London Bridge. Drake, surprised at the accuracy of the boy’s knowledge, exclaimed ‘Hast thou, too, a devil? If I let thee live, there will be one a greater man than I am in the world’; and, so saying, he threw the lad overboard into the sea, where he perished.
Anna Bray’s survey of Devon lore, couched as a series of letters to Robert Southey, is one of the first and fullest of such local investigations, though marred by the author’s somewhat high-flown style. These anecdotes of Drake as necromancer show romantic legend accreting to an heroic figure. Mrs Bray quotes Southey’s response to her letter on Drake, in which he gives a slightly different account of the interrupted wedding. In this Sir Francis returns as a beggar to ask alms from his wife, but is recognized by his smile: an incident, as Southey notes, ‘borrowed from Guy, Earl of Warwick . . . and other romances’. Southey quotes Lope de Vega as saying that he had heard of Drake’s dealings with the Devil while serving in the Armada, from soldiers who had been prisoners in England. Among other legends touched on by Mrs Bray is one that Drake offered to make his home town of Tavistock, which is fourteen miles inland, into a sea- port, in return for a coveted estate. Further legends of Drake can be found in J. R. W. Coxhead’s The Devil in Devon (1967, p. 9) and Briggs and Tongue’s Folktales of England (1965, p. 94).
—
Legends of Sir Francis Drake was extracted from Neil Philip’s The Watkins Book of English Folktales, priced £14.99. Available from 11th October on Amazon and in all good book stores. Giveaway via our Instagram and Patreon.
Our next book club is hybrid! Join us online or in the wonderful Typewronger Books, Edinburgh on 6th June at 7 pm to discuss our next read, Hex by Jenni Fagan.
Hex tells the poignant tale behind the North Berwick Witch Trials. At 112 pages, it can be devoured in less than two hours but it may well stay with you for much longer. This novel has been praised by the likes of Salena Godden and Douglas Stuart; Irvine Welsh said it was “One of the most stunning literary experiences I've had in years.” In 2013 Fagan was the only Scottish writer to be on Granta’s Best of Young British Novelists list.
Tickets are FREE – to get a seat in the bookshop email info@typewronger.com. To join via Zoom, email us at cunningfolkmagazine@gmail.com. Order the book from Typewronger and get 10% off the RRP. Weather permitting, after the event there will be refreshments available outside.
No—I’m not talking about bringing more fantasy and magical realism to your bookshelf, though it might mean that. I felt called to write this after scrawling through reviews for Anne Rice’s Vampire Chronicles, and seeing reader after reader preface their review with disclaimers such as “This was trash” followed inevitably by “but I enjoyed it.” Why do we feel the need to excuse our pleasure? What’s more, why do we assume entertainment is not worthy? Some books might impart little insight, but of all books I have seen generate reader shame, this one irritated me the most. Anne Rice’s atmospheric Vampire Chronicles dealt with questions of suicide, existential emptiness, grief, and the shadow self, as well as their place within theology. It isn’t her fault that her vehicle for these ideas was this folkloric archetypal monster that haunts the shadows, nor that these turned out to be such engaging stories that connected with readers. On the contrary I would have thought it a sign that she was a master of her craft. She redefined the vampire myth and connected with readers on a deep, archetypal level, revealing the shadows of our collective unconscious.
In the 19th century, good writing was popular writing. Dostoyevsky, Dickens, Tolstoy, and Dumas all published their stories as serials, and readers wanted more and more. These were not stories that centred magic but they were engaging and their prose simple. It wasn’t too different from the way we binge Netflix series today. Admittedly they were often a little on the long side, bloated with what now might be considered filler content (I remember scenes of pastoral life getting tiresome in Anna Karenina, in particular), but we have to consider that they were paid by the word or line—and that their words were in great demand. Still, Tolstoy and others like him demonstrated an ability to say a lot with a little in tight short stories such as The Kreutzer Sonata, and The Death of Ivan Illych. It is hard to write a story where you know the heart so well that the prose can narrow in scope. Think of the those books in the careers of modern writers such as Cormac MccCarthy’s The Road and Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go; both got so close to the heart of the matter there was no need for superfluous lyricism. But beauty shines through their semantic richness. The words alone are just words. They do not self-describe as wordsmiths or lovers of words, as if words were shiny things like gold, diamond and titanium we can mine from the ground. But few words, strung together, can convey deep meaning. The writers who have been described as masters of their craft, such as Jhumpa Lahiri, use prose sparingly and to great effect.
And yet somehow, we have come to a place where we believe that literary merit is found in the works that experiment with form, that juggle metaphors, however contrived, that find unusual alternatives for clichés no matter how longwinded and inauthentic. I see it in the way some books are heralded above others: loose, fragmented, flat, perhaps edgy, no demonstrative ability to tell a good story or captivate readers.
Sally Rooney’s first two novels connected with readers in a manner comparable to what would have happened in the 19th century. So many of us felt seen and understood on a deeper level. We also enjoyed the ride. Infamously, Will Self—while promoting a line of macarons at the restaurant Hakkasan in 2019—dismissed her work as “very simple stuff with no literary ambition.” I think Rooney may have had the same bone with books by writers with huge literary ambitions and self-consciously complex prose. In her Normal People, one character laments the state of modern literature: “It was culture as class performance, literature fetishised for its ability to take educated people on false emotional journeys, so that they might afterwards feel superior to the uneducated people whose emotional journeys they liked to read about.” I wonder if in writing her Beautiful World, Where Are You? she was taking a stab again at this literary world, at once criticising the “pretty little novels” about nothing, and (arguably) writing one of them (to make a point?).
Seriously, our priorities have shifted so much: a few months ago I was reading a piece in The New Yorker where the reviewer slated Roberto Bolaño’s prose for its purported flatness. The author Giles Harvey remarked: “He was something of an anachronism: a great novelist who was not a great writer. You have to go back to Balzac and Dostoyevsky to find masters of the novel form who showed so little interest in the sentence.” But if verbosity is seen as the peak of literary prowess, we wouldn’t have Albert Camus or Gustave Flaubert or so many of the writers who are considered masters of their craft. As a Zen gardener pares back the chaos to show us what is most important, I think good writers know which words matter.
This tendency towards self-flagellation exists in other arenas in the art world, too. In a bid to accumulate cultural capital, we’ve stared bleakly at grey canvases justified with an essay full of art talk, read those books that everyone is supposed to like and praise when they offer us nothing at all. Sometimes their hype is justified. But I don’t think many of the works praised for their worthiness now—or namedropped in conversations—will stand the test of time. Ideas about whether or not art ought to be enjoyed have been shifting since the industrial revolution. Now many of us will gladly—or rather, unhappily—sit through a 4-hour opera in absolute silence. In the 18th and 19th century, opera was a more leisurely affair. You’d go irrespective of what was on. It was a chance to meet friends, perhaps meet your future partner. Complain about the performance or sing its praises. Drink and eat. Ilana Walder-Biesanz writes for Opera Vivre about how, in the 18th century, composers would give a less prominent singer the first aria in act two: “This was known as the “sorbet aria”: it was traditional to serve sorbet at that time, and the clinking of the spoons made the music difficult to hear.) If the opera truly bores you, you can always pay a visit to friends in another box or head to the gambling tables.” Cut to the present moment, and eating so much as a snack at the opera is frowned upon, a clear sign of unsophistication. You lose cultural capital.
What we place value in culturally shows what we place value in spiritually. Sometimes I read a book and I think the answer is: we place value in nothing. At the heart of so many books is an empty husk. We are granted a few slivers of real life, and no thread to connect them all. There is no meaning.
This is not to say we can’t have our lyrical novels. A good question might be, to steal from Marie Kondo, do they spark joy? Admittedly this might not be the best measure of the value of a piece of art. It might make us suffer. But that might have a function too. Since our first attempts at art, from the first cave paintings onwards, we’ve been forging storied relationships with the world outside of ourselves and the world within us, honing the art of meaning-making. Do we really need another book about a sad figure wandering around suburbia feeling disenfranchised? Perhaps yes, if it comes from a place of truth. Richard Yates’ Revolutionary Road feels potent and true and leaves you feeling a little different than you were when you went in.
We seem to have arrived in a strange era of binary thinking where the obviously meaningful and impactful and captivating is suspect. The more unnavigable and dare I say it, boring, the worthier. We know binaries are a cultural artifice, so why don’t we acknowledge this?
Re-enchanting our bookshelves means re-injecting wonder, life and meaning into books. Long have our strange species looked to the written word to find out who we are and who we can be and who we must not be. I don’t know about you, but after a pandemic and at the onset of another terrible war, I know which books I’ll be putting down—and which ones I’ll be picking up.