A Walk in a Darker Wood

Folk horror is one of those subcategories that is hard to describe. Is it nature horror? Small town horror? Close, intimate, family horror? Close, intimate family horror in nature near a small town on Mars? OK, now I'm just being weird. Whatever it is, this is a wonderful collection of stories and poetry evoking all of those things I just mentioned. A truly superior anthology, and I'll return to it again and again. Highly recommended.

For fans of folk horror, A Walk in a Darker Wood is a feast. The selections strike a good balance between playfulness, seriousness, and grim despair, and offer some surprising interpretations of the theme by some very talented authors.

I hate to give poor reviews to writing, because I know how much work goes into putting out a novel or even short stories like these. But regardless of the writing in this book, it's completely obscured by the awful editing. Everything from misspellings to poor word choices to repetitive language and beyond, this book is an intelligent reader's nightmare. My least favorite story I read even included formal old-timey characters using modern casual slang, which stuck out like a sore thumb. It's pretty clear that story submissions to this anthology were taken as-is without editorial control or even copyediting. I love folk horror and I really wanted to like this book but I couldn't even finish it. I'm a stickler for proper grammar and good writing and this ain't it. Sorry to say it, I'm sure there probably were some decent stories and many of these authors would shine with the right editor working with them, but here they clearly did not. Give it a pass.

Horror aficionados have a treat in store. A weighty 362 pages starts off with a beguiling introduction, in which co-editor Sarah Walker describes how she acquired a taste for horror as a result of growing up in a former silver mill in the Rocky Mountains. Thirty short stories and poems elaborate on the theme of horror in hidden places, mostly secret and rural, where unwitting folk are confronted with the uncanny and the terrifying.Among my favorites were "Observations of a Black Toad," by Phil Breach; Towards a Place Where Everything's Better, by S.L. Edwards; and "A Slow Remembered Tide," by John Linwood Grant. This new, never-before-published collection is well worth reading, and re-reading.

A top notch collection of folk horror.