‘Come Sing For The Harrowing: Stories by Dan Coxon’ (Clash Books)

 

Page Count: 218 Pages

I know that ‘Folk Horror’ books are a thing and that they are very likely to be my thing (I enjoyed ‘The Wicker Man’ the good one that is, you know what I mean..) For some reason though, I’d never got round to actually checking any books out until the other day. Don’t ask me why… I guess that when you read books ‘on a whim’ like me, that can happen :o)

Anyway…

I saw ‘Come Sing For The Harrowing’, in Waterstones, the other day and picked it up, you guessed it… on a whim. Not just a whim to be fair, I also figured that I had a better chance of actually finishing some shorter Folk Horror fiction; so many books, so little time etc.

So that’s just what I did, and…

From British and World Fantasy award-winning writer and editor Dan Coxon, Come Sing for the Harrowing is an uncanny folk horror collection for fans of John Langan and Robert Aickman.

A young man working at a tourist attraction is singled out for unholy transformation, a gang of burglars are ambushed with something unworldly when they attempt to rob a local farm, and a daughter seeks revenge on her abusive father after his death. Invoking the sense of natural surreal found in Midsommar, these stories are always a little to the left of what’s expected.

Weaving macabre contingencies into realities, Dan Coxon crafts unsettling and eerie worlds through hauntingly literary prose. Including a featured story from Ellen Datlow’s “Best of Horror” round-up and a foreword from Brian Evenson, Come Sing for the Harrowing will haunt your dreams and gnaw at you during the daylight.

‘Come Sing For The Harrowing’ is only just over a couple of hundred pages long but still manages to cram eighteen short stories into a short space so I’m not going to take you through each one. I’ve got a ‘bit of a day’ looming, you get it.

Nope, today we’re all about general impressions but also very much about me saying that if you like Folk and/or Weird Horror, you could do a lot worse than pick up ‘Come Sing For The Harrowing’. Seriously, I reckon you’ll like it.

Lets get the obvious caveat out of the way first though, you know what I’m about to say ;o) ‘Come Sing For The Harrowing’ is very consistent, in the quality of its tales but inevitably, not all of them quite landed for me. Some of the weirder tales were a little too weird for this reader; not so much in tone, more about how certain revelations were revealed. This is probably more a personal preference on my part but I’d argue that even Weird fiction has a kind of logic that it works to, so you’re left feeling unsettled rather than just thinking ‘that was weird…’ Is there such a thing as ‘too weird’? If it gets in the way of the plot, I’d say ‘maybe…’ I’m looking at you in particular, ‘Beyond the Beach, the Trees’, by the way. You know what you did (or rather, didn’t).

Having said all that though, ‘Come Sing For The Harrowing’ was very much ‘more hit than miss’ from where I was sat; happily reading ‘just one more story’.

Like I said, I haven’t really read any Folk Horror but if it’s about the dark undertones that lie beneath old country folklore, Coxon really nails that here. Stories like ‘The Wives of Tromisle’ and ‘From the Earth’ capture the brutal drudge of country living and how that can lead to certain bargains being made. Bargains that may fade from the memories of some but still survive, through the generations, for good reason. Coxon does a good line here in not only showing us the consequences of transgression but also introducing an element of the slightly tragic. In these pages, and particularly in stories like ‘Our Sister of Blackthorn’ and ‘A Broken Vessel’, community is key and interlopers swiftly come to regret trespassing.

As I mentioned earlier, the Weird Horror side of this collection didn’t quite hit the heights of the Folk Horror but there is still a lot here to recommend. I enjoyed how Coxon is clearly more than willing to take an idea and just run with it to see where it ends up; I’m thinking of ‘Grains of Sand’ in particular and a strangely sweet tale of a man out of time. ‘Long Gone (Slight Return)’ was another haunting tale that I think will stay with me for a few days. And because there is a ‘Weird’ component in play here, we also get ‘London Deep’; a Lovecraftian that is unsettling and weird in all the right ways (at least for me anyway).

That’s just scratching the surface of what ‘Come Sing For The Harrowing’ has to offer though, a series of tales that can be hit and miss (in places) but will ultimately stay in your head, and probably in your dreams as well. There’s something here for everyone, a book that you can either dip in and out of or settle down for a disturbing read...