British Horror maven Adam Nevill (The Ritual, No One Gets Out Alive) returns to the fray with Cunning Folk, a novel that quickly shows the author has lost none of his bite.

When Tom and his wife Fiona move to a rural location, they’re dreaming of a golden childhood for their small daughter, Gracey. Far from the city, with a fresh start ahead of them, the couple know they have their work cut out for them in the dilapidated house on the edge of the woods. On the one hand, it’s a potential money pit. On the other, it’s a place with a recent grisly past. With the countryside all around them and summer in the air, what could possibly go wrong?

Try the neighbours. When Tom encounters the elderly couple living next door, Mr and Mrs Moot, he might be forgiven for believing it a disappointing, yet typical confrontation in a new location. Mean-spirited and unbearably condescending, the Moots’ unwelcoming attitude soon gives way to unwanted hedge cutting, slammed doors in faces and missing pets. Who are the strange visitors who pay homage next door? What lurks in the decrepit caravan parked across Tom’s drive? It’s in this petty dispute that Nevill reveals a keen eye for the small nature of some of the residents of his home country, and the first half of the book reads like a delicious and engrossing episode of Neighbours From Hell. It’s hard not to share a guilty smile at the worsening turn of events.

Peppered with enough subtle weirdness to let the reader know that this is far from some mediocre backwater drama, Cunning Folk jolts as much as it sends shivers up the spine, ratcheting up the tension with exquisite aplomb. Soon enough, a vengeful Tom and his family are plunged into a nightmare of horrific proportions, with occult paraphernalia found in the garden, strange transformations seen in the woods and an ancient mound surrounded by stones emanating an ancient and malefic force… When Tom turns to local ‘wizard’ Blackwood for assistance to break the curse settling over his new home, all hell breaks loose. As the pages fly by, Cunning Folk scales to nothing less than a grand slam of modern folk horror.

Sharply written, gripping and as black as sin, Adam Nevill delivers another standout novel in a career studded with them. Cunning Folk is a dark feast, serving up a sumptuous appetiser of rural conflict, a main course of escalating dread, and a toothsome dessert of shattering destruction and loss.

It’s that loss, and its grim potential, that adds a moving and spine-tingling cherry on the top.
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Highly recommended.

A compelling folk horror story of deadly rivalry and the oldest magic from the four times winner of The August Derleth Award for Best Horror Novel.

No home is heaven with hell next door.

Money's tight and their new home is a fixer-upper. Deep in rural South West England, with an ancient wood at the foot of the garden, Tom and his family are miles from anywhere and anyone familiar. His wife, Fiona, was never convinced that buying the money-pit at auction was a good idea. Not least because the previous owner committed suicide. Though no one can explain why.

Within days of crossing the threshold, when hostilities break out with the elderly couple next door, Tom's dreams of future contentment are threatened by an escalating tit-for-tat campaign of petty damage and disruption.

Increasingly isolated and tormented, Tom risks losing his home, everyone dear to him and his mind. Because, surely, only the mad would suspect that the oddballs across the hedgerow command unearthly powers. A malicious magic even older than the eerie wood and the strange barrow therein. A hallowed realm from where, he suspects, his neighbours draw a hideous power.

“Nevill has crafted some of the tensest scariest horror this reviewer has read in years” SFX

“Adam Nevill excels at making nightmares real” The Guardian

Or purchase a copy direct from Adam Nevill by clicking here 

James Bennett is a British writer raised in Sussex and South Africa. His travels have furnished him with an abiding love of different cultures, history and mythology. His short fiction has appeared internationally and his debut novel CHASING EMBERS was shortlisted for Best Newcomer at the British Fantasy Awards 2017.

“The legend of the moxina, an evil spirit which hid in the forest, was said to have developed from those stories about the Saluso. Might the creatures in those legends be a reflection of the guilt and hatred people carry with them?”
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Whisper is the first novel by Taiwanese writer Chang Yu-Ko to be translated into English. It is a powerful and disturbing horror novel, one that takes in Taiwanese and Japanese folklore to speak to the legacy of the Japanese wartime occupation of Taiwan and the social divides that currently shape Taiwanese culture. Intensely paced, Whisper expertly balances its cast of realistic and frequently unlikable yet compelling characters and creeping horror that rises to disturbing and visceral crescendos. The end result is a horror thriller that disturbs on both a visceral and psychological level. Once again Honford Star are to be praised for bringing this book into the English language, replete with striking cover design by Jaehoon Choi.

Taipei taxi driver Wu Shih-sheng’s life is a mess. Once an electronics store manager with a happy family, he now spends his time driving round the city, wasting his money on cigarettes, booze and gambling, avoiding his estranged wife Kuo Hsiang-ying and wondering what happened to their daughter. Shi-sheng and Hsiang-ying’s grim existence is interrupted by the horrific when Hsiang-ying is lured into a nightmare vision by a mysterious voice. Shi-sheng soon learns that his wife and his life are both in danger from a malevolent spirit, and unless he can destroy the spirit’s shrine on Mount Jade both of them will be killed. Meanwhile concerned social worker Jui-yi investigates the circumstances behind Hsiang-ying’s haunting, convinced it must have a link to the legends of the moxina which she learned about whilst researching the indigenous tribes of southern Taiwan. And Hsiang-ying’s sister Kuo Chen-shan finds her perfect family life with her husband falling apart around her as she becomes taken over by a malevolent presence. It’s up to Shi-sheng and Jui-yi to solve the mystery before Shi-sheng, Hsiang-ying and Chen-shan’s time runs out.

Chang expertly combines folklore and the horrific with a vividly realised modern Taiwan and well-rounded characters. All of the novel’s main characters, with the exception of Jui-yi, are incredibly damaged. Shih-sheng is arrogant and entitled and, being unable to accept the blame for how badly his life has turned out, viciously lashes out at those around him, especially his wife. Hsiang-ying is stuck in a co-dependent relationship with her abusive husband, and her sister Chen-shan is snobbish and condescending, only realising too late she has put all her self-worth into the image of being a housewife. These are deeply dysfunctional people whose lives are on the verge of collapse anyway, and the addition of the supernatural into the equation causes each of them to breakdown in various destructive ways. These sharply observed and deeply flawed characters ground Whisper in people’s lived reality, and much of the horror comes from their flaws leading them to make increasingly poor decisions.

Whisper portrays a Taiwan still suffering from the scars of the Japanese occupation, and the malevolent spirit, a creature of Taiwanese mythology driven to feed on the Taiwanese people by the actions of a careless Japanese daughter of a wealthy family, perfectly symbolises how the occupation has left fault lines in modern Taiwanese society. Chang Yu-Ko explores the social climate created by Japanese colonialism, the erasure and displacement of indigenous peoples, and the inherited imbalances of social and monetary power that still exist to this day. As such, Whisper provides an excellent example of how horror can effectively explore these hidden traumas that shape societies and mould the contours of people’s lives.

Chang Yu-Ko does not shirk on the scares. From horrific insectile monsters to deeply unpleasant demon-summoning, Whisper reaches uncomfortable pitches of all-out terror. These intense, hallucinogenic sequences are all the more striking for taking place within the context of the novel’s realistically described setting, from the scuzziest parts of the city of Taipei to the austere beauty of the Taiwanese countryside. A striking aspect of the novel’s construction is that, in keeping with all of its characters’ inability to communicate with each other, the reader is frequently the only person who receives all of the information. Chang increases the sense of dread by providing the reader with more information than the characters, sending them off into increasingly fraught situations missing key pieces of information. By the end, the survivors will never fully understand the full course of events that they have suffered through, but the reader gets the closure of understanding how the main plot threads link together.
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Intelligently constructed and full of effective scares, Whisper is an excellent example of Taiwanese horror. Chang has created an exciting and frightening read with real depth. Enthusiastic readers of horror in translation will hope that Honford Star provide us with more from Chang Yu-Ko and from Taiwanese horror writers in general.

It’s patently obvious when I’ve enjoyed a book – said enjoyment being directly proportional to however-long-I’ve-ignored-the-kids (Not Even Joking). Sorry, little ones, but I devoured Simon Bestwick’s DEVILS OF LONDON (Hersham Horror Books) in one sitting while you were fending for yourselves. Then I went back for seconds to ensure I hadn’t missed anything—at a speedy 114 pages, there’s no excuse not to indulge twice.

We’re in London, in the not-too-distant future. That future is now, and we’re immediately thrown in at the scorching deep end. No meandering, no faff, only relentless storytelling. As an all-new, all-singing, all-dancing Great Fire of London breaks out, we follow John’s journey as he makes his way through fire and life and a fuckton of horror. John’s just a regular geezer, because of course he is (Bestwick sure knows his shiz about creating identifiable, quintessentially British characters). And along with John and his buddies—co-workers, really—we flee the impending apocalypse. I say ‘we’ because young Bestie m’lad knows how to engage the reader: hook ’em, reel ’em in, and keep ’em there, right in the heart of the story.

Along the way, we meet something ’orrible – and something even ’orribler. But which is which? Who’s worse? That’s for me to know and you to find out (neh-neh). I don’t want to get all spoilery on you, but what a joy it is to hear from the other side (literally), the main narrative being interspersed as it is with a chunk of first-person Devil-POV, which might have been jarring had it been poorly executed. Which this wasn’t. So there. No, it’s a welcome change: the author has given the Devil a platform here and it’s refreshing AF.

With a subtle colour palette, the artist that is Simon Bestwick paints a nicely-rounded cross-section of society and frames it in terror. Through the greys of the smoke, through the filth and the ash raining down upon the city, we see red cars, red eyes, steel toecaps glowing cherry red in the heat, all making for a cloying, suitably uncomfortable effect. The heat, as they say, is on. But in a refreshing deviation from convention and trope—call it subversion, if you will—yellow gets a say here, too. Typically associated with cowardice, this colour is given a new definition: people are twats. They just are. They always have been, and they always will be. Bestwick knows this, so he plays with it in DEVILS, giving us just enough info about an ’orrible lot known as the Yellow-Scarves. Somewhat ambiguous to begin with, we learn their names later on, the author’s instinct serving his tale well – familiarity breeds contempt, humanity, and in this case, horror. Sure, these particular twats might have been a tad creepier had they retained a smidgen of that aforementioned ambiguity, but making them real and giving them humanity is equally as terrifying when you think about it: the beast within, and all that.

So there has to be something bad, right? There’s always something you’d have done differently (and if not, you should make up something negative to give a balanced review, yes?) Ah, bollocks to that. Bollocks, I say. You can take this story any number of ways – as you find it, it has a beginning, a middle, and an end: something happens, and we follow the journey. Or you could get all deep and thinky; there’s philosophy in them thar words, I tellzya. Through a trichotomous viewfinder, though, I found myself contemplating the hierarchical structure of the piece, what with hell being empty, ’n’ all. But who—and where—are the devils?

DEVILS OF LONDON is an easy read, which is fine by me because I have the attention span of a splattered gnat these days – if you don’t hook me by page one (paragraph one, if I’m being honest), then down goes the book. For me to read anything twice is …erm … a first.
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HISTORY is Simon’s thang, and it shows. The devil can cite Scripture for his purpose; Bestwick can cite history. The point is: do we learn from it?
*****Five flaming stars.*****

​An editor of over twenty years (current bosses include Haverhill House and Horrific Tales Publishing), Linda despises writing about herself in third person. She also weirdly writes her own weird brand of weird shite, has a penchant for swearing and silliness, and has been known to get serious at times (Great British Horror, Vol. 5 —Black Shuck Books) and downright disgusting at others (Splatterpunk Zine —Sinister Horror Company). She uses her alter ego for that shit—CM Franklyn has no filter. You can also find her ramblings in a bunch of anthologies whose curators were bonkers enough to publish them. Her debut collection, Stranger Companies (Kuboa Press), is now out of print at her request, so there is no point having mentioned it here. A bunch of equally experimental wordage is forthcoming, but for now, you can rest easy in the knowledge that she has four kids, two cats, and a pair of breasts she already knows about (without the need for surprise boobal exposition via mirror breaks and/or shower scenes of a revelatory nature).

You can find some of her ramblings over at liberatetutemet.com.

Or pop on over to Facebook and say hi:
​https:/www.facebook.com/claudia.franklyn.92