 what makes the strength of Hard For Hope to Flourish is its variety, with all three novellas perfectly chosen to complement one another. If the other entries in the Night Bites series are this good then it deserves to be a big success. I’ve always been fond of novellas, and some of my favourite horror anthologists (such as Ellen Datlow and Stephen Jones) appeal to me partly because they aren’t afraid to include longer material in their short story collections. However, many novella writers struggle to place their work in conventional anthologies of short fiction. Crone Girls’ Midnight Bites series offers a solution to this problem: each number in the series is a trio of novellas that the editor Rachel A. Brune couldn’t find space for elsewhere but still found it “hard to say no to” (according to her interview at Horror Tree). With Midnight Bites 2: Hard For Hope To Flourish it’s apparently the turn of “literary horror”. I’m really not sure what is meant by the term, though as far as I can tell it just means horror writing that doesn’t suck. Sometimes it is also used to refer to traditional horror in the mould of M R James, Arthur Machen and so on, but none of the stories here owe much to pre-war authors. This is all very modern writing and there’s certainly no pastiche material in sight. Melanie Bell’s “The Cliffman” is a dreamy rite-of-passage fantasy with a pretty seaside setting. It’s told in a semi-realist style that leans towards the fairy tale or folk legend (with characters referred to as “the mother”, “the younger sister” etc. and featuring elemental deities who present humans with archetypal challenges). This isn’t normally my sort of thing, and I found the sing-song prose at times a bit self-consciously fey for my taste, but it’s a superior example of this kind of fiction and crucially, there is enough psychological veracity and “nowness” here to make the characters more than mere placeholders for eco-feminist ideas. Bell has also created original and striking deities – no easy task – breaking away from the tired old tradition of representing the sea as something uniquely feminine. If you do like picturesque nouveau folklore then you should absolutely love this. “Paranoia: The Disappearance of Mr. Boasi Joram Nyaoma” by Nyamweya Maxwell offers a stark contrast to the Bell novella in a number of ways. Maxwell is having no truck with that absence of character names, for a start, and is careful to ensure we know the first name, middle name and surname of just about everybody involved. This gives the opening passages a slightly quaint, comical feel, though if you find that irksome, just wait a bit, because things get serious pretty quick. The luckless hero’s mind has become a battleground for unseen forces, which initially manifest as schizophrenic voices in his head but eventually take a more tangible and horrific form. Maxwell sticks pretty closely to the template made popular by any number of social-decay-and-mind-control stories from the 80s and 90s (see Thomas Tessier’s ‘The Dreams of Dr. Ladybank’ for a memorable example), but the Nairobi setting and characters are refreshing, at least to the Western reader, and Maxwell is unrelenting when it comes to bringing the terrors of mental violation and urban blight to life. The whole thing crackles with tension and a sick anxiety that doesn’t let up, and reminded me how much I used to enjoy those old stories. Let’s hope for a revival of this currently neglected strain of horror. Things wind up with ‘The Whispering Marsh’ by Thomas Ouphe. This is the longest novella here, taking up half the book, and it starts off conventionally enough: an estuary day out turns hellish for a young family when Dad is seized by the dark forces lurking in the local marsh. Fast-forward a couple of decades, and the surviving family members, now all adults, are still trying to process what happened. Daughter Jenna agrees to be interviewed as part of a cold-case documentary investigating the mystery, and in due course all hell breaks loose. Marshland is historically very fertile ground for supernatural fiction, and this particular marsh is on the Wirral peninsula, which has been identified by Adam Scovell as an unusually weird place, partly due to the “ethereal liminality” of its location, pulled between the poles of Chester, Liverpool and rural Wales. Ouphe does of course make use of this, with parts of the novella obviously aiming for a similar effect to famous waterland stories like ‘Three Miles Up’ by Elizabeth Jane Howard or ‘The Hide’ by Liz Williams. However, what he does best is characters, and the family dynamics (as expressed in a series of terse but enthralling conversations) are what give the novella its bite and keep the reader hooked, with beleaguered but resourceful son-in-law Ranil being an especially likeable character. There’s also plenty of action to go with the dialogue – it soon becomes obvious that the marsh isn’t going to be content with just the one victim – and things barrel along nicely with some interesting use of drone technology. I would’ve preferred an ending with slightly less explanation, but Ouphe is a very competent angler in the lake of darkness and ‘The Whispering Marsh’ is an enjoyable read that justifies its length and will, I think, have the broadest appeal of all the stories in this anthology. Of course, other readers will have other favourites, but what makes the strength of Hard For Hope to Flourish is its variety, with all three novellas perfectly chosen to complement one another. If the other entries in the Night Bites series are this good then it deserves to be a big success.  Two sisters follow separate, dangerous paths in search of beauty, magic, and escape from the deadening nature of the prosaic world. A voice in his head leads Mr. Boasi Joram Nyaoma into a world worse than madness and the slow death of hope. Tired of the tabloid speculation their father’s disappearance feeds, Amelia finds herself inexorably drawn to the marshland where, over twenty years ago, something called him to his death. Settle in for three literary tales of quiet horror—stories to chill the blood as the night draws on and the shadows creep closer along the floor.    Comments are closed.
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