'Help the Witch' by Tom Cox (Unbound, 2018)
As some of you may remember, I really enjoyed Tom Cox's '21st Century Yokel' about this time last year. His next adventure was in short fiction, so, as a short story fan, I couldn't wait to try his folk horror collection 'Help the Witch'.
'Help the Witch' is a collection of ten tense tales which put the nature back into the supernatural. A village's dark past haunts a new resident in the story 'Help the Witch', while a covertly sinister waterway permeates 'The Pool'. Spirits walk in unlikely places in 'Speed Awareness' and 'Just Good Friends' and morality tales are modernised and subverted for comic effect in 'Folk Tales for the Twenty-Third Century'. This is a collection that draws readers' attentions to the murky shadows that are inevitably cast even on bright, sunny days in the countryside. You can't have one without the other, after all. You may not notice them as you picnic and play, but they're always there. And they may be out to get you...
