REVIEW: ‘The Haunting Season’ features eight ghostly tales for long winter nights
Image courtesy of Pegasus Books / Provided by official site.
The new anthology collection The Haunting Season features some exquisitely written stories involving ghosts, beasts and other things that go bump in the night. These 300 pages are readymade for a long winter night, but don’t wait that long because Halloween is right around the corner. Readers can pick up the book, select a story (at their peril) and get transported to another time, another place and sometimes another dimension.
There’s not a bad tale in the book, although a few shine brighter than others. They each have some commonality — for example, the tales take place, for the most part, in the United Kingdom during the winter — but the shape and trajectory of each story is the individual domain of the skilled writers who have been assembled for this literary project.
The opening passage is “A Study in Black and White” by Bridget Collins. This haunted house tale is a wonderful opener to these eight stories, mostly because the mood is immediately set with a dark and dreadful eeriness that pulsates through these initial 30 pages. The story deals with a protagonist named Morton who decides to move into a foreboding and creepy house almost within minutes of first seeing it. He is struck by many details of this “great find,” especially a large chess set that proves pivotal to the narrative.
These stories are not bone-chillingly scary, although there were a few times when a sound in this reviewer’s house made him look up from the page and scan through the immediate area, just to be sure her was, in fact, alone. Most of these short stories are atmospherically creepy, with fine detail about creaky houses, unique environments and characters who probably shouldn’t be trusted. Think Gothic horror more than than slasher-film horror.
There’s a social conscience to some fo the stories as well, and this is particularly the case with Imogen Hermes Gowar’s “Thwaite’s Tenant,” which details the real-life horror of domestic violence and how a mother feels trapped between two evil forces, her husband and her father. The story is moving and terrifying, mostly for plot developments that have nothing to do with the paranormal or supernatural. Gowar is also skilled at description and the gray area between dream and reality. “I awoke to the rattling of the door. I was too mazy to understand, at first, whether I dreamed or woke, and I cried out when the bolt shot back and the door opened,” she writes quite effectively in one passage.
Natasha Pulley’s “The Eel Singers” plays on local legends and the inability to escape them. “Lily Wilt” by Jess Kidd finds a funeral photographer falling for one of his deceased subjects. “The Chillingham Chair” by Laura Purcell reminds the reader to not take anything for granted, and things are not always what they seem. “The Hanging of the Greens” by Andrew Michael Hurley has some of the best atmospherics and descriptive setting within the anthology.
The final two stories — “Confinement” by Kiran Millwood Hargrave and “Monster” by Elizabeth Macneal — may be the strongest, but ultimately what proves better than the rest is a matter of personal taste. Hargrave’s story is seemingly built upon familiar ground, featuring the horror-filled experiences of a new mother, but the author travels to some novel places when considering the fate of its central character, Catherine Elizabeth Mary Blake. The first-person narrative, delivered to the readers as a testimony, is a study in what happens when a woman is believed by others to be mad and how confinement, of many different types, can forever impact a mother and her child. A story-ending author’s note places the tale in further perspective and context.
“Monster” is a gem, featuring an ambitious explorer who will stop at nothing to find a set of fossils for a species that has never been discovered before. Along the way, he loses sight of himself and those around him, and he pays dearly for his obsession with attaining fame and fortune. This one is a perfect ending to a chilling, ghostly book.
The Haunting Season offers eight strange and unsettling tales for those readers who cherish the glow of a candle, the creak of a floorboard and the realization of monsters waiting to be summoned.
By John Soltes / Publisher / John@HollywoodSoapbox.com
The Haunting Season features stories by Bridget Collins, Natasha Pulley, Kiran Millwood Hargrave, Elizabeth Macneal, Laura Purcell, Andrew Michael Hurley, Jess Kidd and Imogen Hermes Gowar. 336 pages. Pegasus Books. Click here for more information.
