WITCH BOTTLE BY TOM FLETCHER (BOOK REVIEW)

I’ll have two pints of milk, a slab of cheese and your best witch bottle please!

Later in the year James Brogden’s excellent Bone Harvest is released, one of the main story threads is based around rural village allotments and you might be forgiven by asking how on earth a horror novel can be based around this quaint and rather middle-England subject? Tom Fletcher does something similar in his equally impressive Witch Bottle, however, switching topics from allotments to the countryside milkman who delivers milk, fruit, and vegetables to those who live in the wilds of Cheshire, including farms, and villages. As with Bone Harvest you might be curious how a supernatural story can be built around such the humdrum topic of milkmen? However, Tom Fletcher pulls it off with aplomb, with the repetitiveness of the daily deliveries playing a big part in the action and if you make it past the particularly slow first 30% Witch Bottle is both a great and beguiling read.

What is a ‘Witch Bottle’ you may ask? As I had a feeling it was based in historical fact, the novel had me reaching for Google and Wikipedia which revealed:

“A witch or folk healer would prepare the witch's bottle. Historically, the witch's bottle contained the victim's (the person who believed they had a spell put on them, for example) urine, hair or nail clippings, or red thread from sprite traps. Later witch bottles were filled with rosemary, needles and pins, and red wine.”

If you feel inclined, you can visit Ebay for all sorts of modern-day ‘Wikka’ equivalents and spent less than a tenner (which I guess does not include authentic semen or other bodily fluids, but I guess, you never know!) That is not the case in Witch Bottle, in which a modern-day witch creates bottles and protection wards holding supernatural properties and has her new boyfriend deliver these ‘extras’ to her customers whilst on his daily milk run around the rural parts of north west England. As she hopes to keep her witch identity anonymous and separate from her day job, she relies on her boyfriend Daniel, who is the story’s main character and has a host of his own problems, to make these special deliveries. Part of the entertainment is Danny keeping this side-line secret from his work colleagues and does not want anybody saying, “I’ll have two pints on milk, a kilo of cheese and a witch bottle please!”

Witch Bottle has been namechecked in comparison to Andrew Michael Hurley who wrote The Loney, Devil’s Day and Starve Acre, having read all of Hurley’s work, this is a fair comparison and Fletcher more than holds his own. I would not necessarily call this novel Folk Horror, however, there are definitely vibes, and similar to Hurley, location is critical and truly dominates the book as we head along the A595 to Beckermet, Thornhill, Westlakes, Craggesund and other remote locations delivering eggs, bacon, fruit and milk. The location helps develop atmosphere and as Daniel greets his customers, often rural farmers, one gets a true sense of isolation as this might be the only human contact the customers receive all day. And Danny is not exactly a great talker.

Although it was not a long novel, the length of time and detail spent on the milk rounds might test the patience of some readers, myself, I rather enjoyed it. The business, owned by ‘Bean’, is forever a small step away (or so she says) from bankruptcy and the team of milkmen are forever under the cosh to deliver on time, hold onto orders, have enough loafs of bread in their vans, decide whether the milk has curled or if extending the credit of a customer who is a few pounds short is acceptable without incurring Bean’s wrath. And whatever the milkmen do their boss is rarely happy, pleading poverty, and threatening them with pay-cuts. I enjoyed the compelling balance between  the trials of rural working-class life and the supernatural which is kept on the quiet, where cash and conversation is in short supply, but a belief in the old ways exists, even if never spoken about.

The use of the undiagnosed supernatural was truly superb; lots of people (including Daniel) start seeing ghosts and without going into detail, most accept this as relatively normal and turn to the witch bottles as a way of protection or release. Ghosts are big business in rural Cheshire and so the side-business sees immediate success, if it was not for the fact that the witch bottles are sold via the internet, the book has a feeling of being set much further back in time, perhaps the seventies.  Even though it took a while for this main story strand to find its legs I wish it had been developed further, but in the end, it seemed to be side-lined before the book concluded and I found this to be frustrating as it was one of the strongest elements of Witch Bottle with the witch herself being written out of the plot before her story seemed truly concluded. Whilst the milkmen are out on their routes they often bump into another organisation, Fallen Stock, which collects animal carcasses which was another fascinating part of the plot, but again I was not convinced the way it was ultimately connected to the witch bottle story. Ultimately the ending seemed a bit rushed in bringing the threads together, which was not necessary in a relatively short novel and what had previously been relatively ‘quiet’ horror became jarringly loud and I am not sure it gelled together.   

A deep sense of loneliness permeates throughout Witch Bottle, much of it centres around Daniel and his problems regarding repressed guilt, loss, grief, fear, and his estranged family. Various aspects of this is covered in flashback, which has a deliberately disjointed style which mirrors his state of mind which worsens when he also begins to see a ghost and becomes tied to a witch bottle. If you are a fan of broken central characters, hiding in dead-end jobs, then Daniel is hard to beat and spending time in his head is not a comfortable experience, nor is it meant to be.

I love atmospheric and slow-burning horror novels which are top heavy with an undiagnosed sense of the  supernatural, and even though I have highlighted a couple of shortcomings, I found Witch Bottle tremendously entertaining and am very happy to recommend it. How often are you going to read a grittily realistic horror novel with a milkman as a central character? “I’ll have three pints and a half dozen eggs please!”

Tony Jones

A deeply atmospheric literary horror novel about the nature of repressed guilt, grief and fear.

Daniel once had a baby brother, but he died, a long time ago now. And he had a wife and a daughter, but that didn't work out, so now he's alone. The easy monotony of his job as a milkman in the remote northwest of England demands nothing from him other than dealing with unreasonable customer demands and the vagaries of his enigmatic boss.

But things are changing. Daniel's started having nightmares, seeing things that can't possibly be there - like the naked, emaciated giant with a black bag over its head which is so real he swears he could touch it . . . if he dared.

It's not just at night bad things are happening, either, or just to him. Shaken and unnerved, he opens up to a local witch. She can't t discern the origins of his haunting, but she can provide him with a protective ward - a witch-bottle - if, in return, he will deliver her products on his rounds.

But not everyone's happy to find people meddling with witch-bottles. Things are about to get very unpleasant . . .

Witch Bottle is literary horror at its finest, perfect for fans of Andrew Michael Hurley's The Loney and Starve Acre.

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