The Haunting Season: Eight Ghostly Tails for Long Winter Nights (And Days)
Introduction
It has been a somewhat oscillatory winter here in the Maritimes, with temperatures ranging from -20°C to 5°C depending on the day. Snow has been intermittent, although when it does arrive, it arrives in droves and its remnants coat the sidewalks for weeks at a time. Amidst the constant melting and refreezing, the grey, blustery days, and the long, dark, and frigid winter nights, I found myself perusing my to-be-read pile in search of something suitably gloomy to read. I settled upon The Haunting Season, which has been on my list since it was published in the fall of 2021, and as my book-reviewing skills are somewhat rusty, I decided to use the collection to end my hiatus from publicly accessible literary criticism.
The Haunting Season is an anthology of eight short stories that range from mildly spooky to genuinely disturbing. They range in themes and subject matter (although all of them seem to sit firmly in an ostensibly western horror tradition) and employ a range of techniques from isolationism to The Weird to the pure horror of mundanity. Overall, I’d recommend the collection if you’re looking for some light spooky reading, but I wouldn’t necessarily encourage one to go out of their way to procure a copy unless, like me, you get a real thrill from adding to an ever-growing collection of horror literature that threatens the structural integrity of your thrifted (and possibly haunted) nightstand.
I hope you enjoy my thoughts on each of these short stories. As always, I try to strike a balance between giving enough detail to contextualize the thoughts I share and obscuring enough detail to pique interest. There will be spoilers, but I don’t think they should dissuade anyone from reading the stories themselves. After all, if the only reason we read was for pure plot, then we would never watch films as the Wikipedia summary would be more than enough.
I’m also introducing a bit in this piece that I call the “Two-Sentence Summary”. In reality this is often one sentence, and sometimes three, but at its core it’s an oversimplified and intentionally mediocre summary of a piece of writing. I use them to help jog my memory when reading over my notes and found the technique helpful when slogging through vast swaths of books in grad school. I thought people might get a kick out of them, so I’ve added them to each ‘review.’
So, without further ado, here are some thoughts on The Haunting Season.
“A Study in Black and White” – Bridget Collins
TLDR: Outsider rents haunted cottage. Dies there.
Rural settings are perfect for that uncomfortable isolationary creepiness that the Gothic does so well. The slight hint of gentrification in the base plot here also adds a little je ne sais quois. The arc of a possibly well-off newcomer to a small town who wants the gorgeous yet strangely empty and alarmingly cheap historic mansion on the edge of the forest isn’t a new story by any means, but I enjoy how Collins plays with the hubris of an out-of-towner brushing off the locals for being “silly and superstitious” instead of heeding the warning. There is a chess motif that is very intriguing, and a good malevolent haunting is always fun. The idea of playing chess with an unknown entity in your house adds some metatextual interplay between the chess board and the steps both the tenant and the ghost take to outsmart the other – which to me adds merit as the victim of the haunting is actively attempting to avoid the entity instead of just walking stupidly into its clutches. The aesthetic of the piece is well-executed, and this is a solid haunted house story that warms the reader up for the rest of the collection.
Overall creep factor here is a 4/10. Delightfully spooky, not too distressing.
“Thwaite’s Tenant” – Imogen Hermes Gowar
TLDR: Ghost of battered woman enabler of living woman’s abuser.
This is one of those stories where the reality of the situation is far more disturbing than the supernatural forces at work in the background, as “Thwaite’s Tennant” follows a woman and her young son as she flees from an abusive husband. The descriptive writing in this is exemplary, with the panic, discomfort, and grief of fleeing etched into the very prose of the piece. The narrative centers the woman’s perspective while foregrounding the historical context around marriage convention and law in what is presumably mid-to-late 19th century England – particularly the contentious policies around men’s rights to use their spouse’s bodies. The main antagonist in this narrative is not the violent husband, however, but the protagonist’s own father, who insists on either returning both the protagonist and the child to the “abandoned” spouse. If she refuses, he threatens to return the child to his father and leave the heroine to fend for herself.
“[Father], he misused me, he did things [to me]...”
“As is his right.”
It is at this point that the haunting of their safehouse settles into its context, with the various bumps and screeches in the night acting as warnings rather than threats to the protagonist and her son. The narrative ends with the protagonist deciding to make a run for it with her son, while the spirit of the house ensures the father cannot make good on his threat to return them to the home they escaped.
This story is a 2/10 on the supernatural creepy scale and an 8/10 on the reality creepy scale, simply for the historical accuracy of the protagonist’s situation and the support her father gives to the perpetrator of her abuse.
“The Eel Singers” – Natasha Pulley
TLDR: Creepy locals try to sing a quasi-psychic family into drowning themselves in a lake to get at their (very psychic) kid.
This one gets weird (as in The Weird, not just generally ‘weird’. There’s a general fuzziness here that skirts the literary understanding of The Weird, with the horror employed playing off the unreliability of their objective reality). The narrative follows a psychic family plagued by their gifts, which are referred to throughout the story as “remembering the future”, which is a phenomenally interesting concept when you really think about it. How else would true clairvoyance appear, except as an already formulated memory? I digress.
The family in this story – desperate for a break from the constant bombardment of future-knowledge – moves to a psychic dead zone to get a break from their gifts. This dead zone blocks their gifts, yes, but it also makes them discoverable to a series of humanoid creatures that would very much like to get their hands on the main couple’s daughter, whose gifts are strong enough not to be fully affected by the dead zone. The protagonist here finds himself ‘sleepwalking’ in the woods, waking up closer and closer to (and finally in) the lake near their cabin.
“The lake was so clear that you could see all the way down. At the bottom was a strange impression of waving that might have been fields of dark weeds. But there were other things too, gleaming around the causeway’s struts. Coins, and bigger shapes that could have been knives or jewellery, amid bones. He could even make out the teeth on what he was nearly certain was the mandible of a horse.”
What follows is some delightfully eldritch horror motifs, a thronging of creepy singing aquatic forest dwellers, a mad escape through the woods in the dead of winter, and a light hint of amnesia.
Creep factor here is an 8/10. Fantastic weird energy, genuinely skin-crawling prospects here.
“Lily Wilt” – Jess Kidd
TLDR: Obsessed man attempts to bring his lover back from the dead. She decays in (new) life more than she ever did in death.
I don’t think it’s any secret on this blog that Jess Kidd is one of my favourite authors active today. Her novel Things in Jars was one of the first reviews I published on this blog, and I enjoyed her novel Himself as well, which I’ve debated featuring on the blog. It has ghosts, but I’m not entirely sure it fits as a Gothic novel. If I get enough support, though, I’d happily write a piece on it.
Kidd’s story in this collection is delightfully disturbing. Tangentially necrophilic, the mentally unstable photographer obsessed with the tragically beautiful (and tragically dead) Lily Wilt is a romp through the seedy underbelly of Victorian London mysticism and magic. Seeking potions and spells to reconstitute his beloved Lily so that they might finally achieve consummation, the vapid, asp-like spirit of Lily is a constant voice of unreasonability throughout the story, and her constant demands in her new life fall flat on the expectations that the pair had for her rebirth.
“...[She thought of] life and death and that awful thing in between.” – Jess Kidd, 204 (Lily Wilt)
“That awful thing in between” is one of the two main sources of horror here, next to the depraved obsession over Lily’s (again, very) dead body and the lengths that our disturbed photographer will go to undress it without social repute.
Creep factor 8/10, would recommend.
“The Chillingham Chair” – Laura Purcell
TLDR: Haunted chair torments young, injured spinster. Its motivations are only revealed when it’s already too late.
Haunted machines are a trope I don’t often see employed. This is probably due to my own reading habits rather than the existence of these stories out in the world, but regardless, I found the choice to haunt something gear-based to be at once refreshing and intriguing. After the heroine of this particular tale is injured in a horse-riding accident, she is confined to the mechanical wheelchair previously belonging to the deceased father of her soon-to-be brother-in-law. The chair seems to have a mind of its own, wheeling her to different parts of the house, the library, and finally, the poison garden.
It is only when the chair reveals the remains of a ‘missing’ family member that the reasons behind chair’s antics become clear, and our protagonist realizes the kind of danger she and her sister are in from the dashing suitor whose manor they are sequestered in.
Creep factor 5/10: good creepy chair antics with the bonus of disability (albeit transient) as a lens through which the Gothic to operate.
“The Hanging of the Greens” – Andrew Michael Hurley
TLDR: Evil spirit possesses local drunk. The subsequent exorcism wreaks havoc on the resident farm and the community at large.
I have a soft spot for Southern Gothic. Any kind of high-religious, rural farm horror that speaks to the passionate hegemony of American evangelism intrigues me. You can see a bit of this in my piece on The Devil All The Time. The zealot-turned-atheist (or pagan) is a favourite of mine, so I was engaged from the jump in this particular piece.
“Oh yes, I’d chosen not to moon about after a girlfriend (or any friend come to that), I’d chosen not to socialise with people my own age, I’d chosen to carry on living with my parents – because it meant that I could make myself indispensable to the parish, as God had intended me to do.”
I actually ended up reading this story twice to get the full understanding of what was going, as my one gripe with it was that the ‘time skipping’ to cover the breadth of the story sometimes lead to confusion about what was actually occurring and what was not. It can be argued that this was an intentional part of the narrative, but it’s always a fine line to walk between intentional and unintentional confusion in a reader, and this in some ways did not quite execute it as eloquently as I think that kind of narrative device needs to be.
The contrast between normal and possessed behaviour, the oscillation between concern and fear, and the slow poisoning of piousness are all well-executed through this piece, and I really enjoyed it – although I’d suggest making you’re well-rested and well caffeinated when you give it a go so you’re prepared to keep details straight when the narrative gets murky.
Creep Factor 7/10: exorcisms are creepy and rural religious Gothic is always frightening.
“Confinement” – Kiran Millwood Hargrave
TLDR: Woman suffers traumatic birth in cabin. Family refuses to heed her warnings of a malevolent spirit coming after the baby, fearing mother’s delirium.
I liked that this piece was based off a real historical first-hand account from late medieval church records. This piece draws on, I’d argue, folkloric variations of the faeries, monsters, demons, and trolls that steal newborns and prey on the weakened post-birth woman for their food.
What made this piece interesting to me was the hyper rationality and hyper irrationality that are juxtaposed throughout the piece. After a near-death birth experience and a persistent, high fever, the caretakers of our protagonist are understandably skeptical of her visions of a dark figure looming over her newborn’s cot when she is left alone and unattended during the night. Although we are never given enough information to determine if this monster is real or the result of delirium, the difficult realities of traumatic birth, extreme injury, and the acute vulnerability of the postpartum period lends itself well to the folk horror that was deployed throughout the piece, and Hargrave does an excellent job of stoking anxiety in the reader.
Creep factor 8/10: childbirth that nearly results in death is terrifying enough without demons thrown in.
“Monster” – Elizabeth McNeal
TLDR: Man witnesses child death while hunting monsters in rural England. Guilt, jealousy, and madness drive him to become a monster in his own right.
The best monsters are usually just a person. The monster of this narrative is clear from the jump, with the narrator fully admitting to being a jealous, insecure bully with delusions of grandeur and an aggression problem. Freshly 30 and arm and arm with his new wife (whom he can’t relate to emotionally and tends to brush off as a status piece despite longing for a deeper connection), he goes hunting for paleolithic discovery in coastal England – monster hunting. He stumbles across a skeleton of some kind, perhaps a dinosaur or some kind of seal-like creature, and in insisting on searching amidst the poor weather, the child he has hired to guide him through the muck dies in the resulting storm. So obsessed is the narrator with his discovery, he shows little concern for the boy and becomes increasingly irate with the townsfolk and his wife for focusing on their grief during his “moment of glory.”
This story is high drama, with adultery, illness, discovery, passion, and death making the headlines. The implied supernatural elements were not as clear as I really want them to be, and this was another story I had to re-read before writing this piece to ensure I was clear on things before I attempted to write on them, but the dramatic elements of the piece compensate for the implied supernatural ends that are never quite tied together.
Creep factor 5/10: a man on a mission with no regard for the health and safety of others is a harrowing figure.
Conclusion
I am a huge fan of horror anthologies. They are easy to read (albeit more difficult to write about for someone like me who wants to do each story justice), offer snippets of different genres and types of horror for someone wanting to whet their palette in the genre, and they’re good for busy times in life when you can only get a chapter or two of reading in at a time.
This was a collection I enjoyed, and it was what I needed to get me out of my reading rut and end the hiatus this blog has been on since 2022. Life seems to be settling into a more normal rhythm, and I’m looking forward to getting back into writing about literature – which is a long-time love of mine that I’m sorry I ever let fall away.
Happy reading, and if you do pick up this collection, I’d love to hear your thoughts on it.
Sincerely,
L
