'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...
Unfortunately, I found 'Help the Witch' to be a bit of a mixed bag. The first story (after which the collection is named) was definitely the weakest. It took me three attempts to get through it. Knowing the area in which it's set and recognising much of the fact behind the fiction, at best it felt like a transition piece aimed at easing readers who enjoyed the travel and nature writing of '21st Century Yokel' into something rather different. At worst, it felt a bit loose and as though Cox wasn't sure where he was trying to take the reader or what he was trying to achieve.
Later stories are still a bit patchy at times, but are at their best when Cox stops being coy and shows faith in his own work and abilities. The more confident pieces are highly enjoyable and send the required chill down the spine, reminding me of the excellent 'Sing of the Shore'. I particularly liked 'Listings', an epistolary-style work tracing the history of an ill-lucked area of Somerset, 'The Pool', with it's echos of Celtic myths about watery doorways to other worlds, 'Just Good Friends', and 'Folk Tales for the Twenty-Third Century', which made me laugh at its unexpected wryness.
Overall, this collection felt like it wasn't quite ready for reading. I don't want to go as far as saying it read like a series of writing exercises, but it did feel like Cox was gaining momentum and that 'Help the Witch' was building up to something truly terrifying. He clearly has a strong sense of the sinister side of nature - the malevolent elementals, the roadkill, the protective knowledge lost to urban modernity - and can portray it in a way that speaks to a reader's most primal fears. As such, I'm hoping that he's now in his stride and ready to let rip with a confidently chilling second collection.
Now, what next...?
'Help the Witch' by Tom Cox was published by Unbound in 2018. This review is based on the ebook edition.
