Month: February 2020

Haunted Voices: An Anthology of Gothic Storytelling from Scotland

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The Haunted Voices cover with a tiny ghost in a tiny jar on top.

Haunted Voices is a collection of spooky stories by Scotland’s oral storytellers, in both text and audio format. The stories are short and varied, including some from archival recordings of past storytellers and others that are distinctly modern involving video shops and ghosts watching Love Island. The collection has a wide range of tales, all featuring gothic elements but with varying levels of terror and humour, and often a sense of locality and oral tradition.

Though the anthology has two elements, text and audio, it is difficult not to think of all of the pieces as how they’d be told out loud, even when reading the book. The variety of the collection makes it exciting to see what is coming next, and the short length of the stories means that readers could easily pick and choose which to read or listen to at what point. As someone who doesn’t listen to audiobooks due to an inability to focus on them, I read the collection first, then went back and listened to some of the stories that had stuck with me, but I imagine that for a lot of people, it will be the audio version that is the real selling point, and the text more of a bonus extra. Some of my highlights were ‘Soul Mates’, a goth love story in a graveyard (there are a lot of graveyards in the collection, as you might expect), ‘the possession’, a tale of hungry ghosts and what they really want, and ‘The Cravin’, a comic yet thoughtful reimagining of Poe’s ‘The Raven’.

This collection features a range of stories, storytellers, and Scottish locations, really showcasing the fact that Gothic oral storytelling is alive and haunting. The audio version will definitely appeal to anyone who enjoys spooky podcasts and similar audio storytelling forms, and the text version is great for dipping in and out of due to the short length of the stories.

(Get the book or audiobook from Haunt Publishing)

You Let Me In by Camilla Bruce

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You Let Me In is an eerie gothic novel about the life of one woman and how stories can be true and false at once. Novelist Cassandra Tipp has disappeared, and left behind a long manuscript, a letter to her niece and nephew that starts to unfold the truth behind the murders that she is infamous in the local area for being somehow involved with, though her guilt could never be proven. As her narrative progresses, it is clear there are two stories: one of faeries in the woods, gifts, and blood, and another of a girl mistreated, tormented and tormenting, who imagined an alternate reality. The question is, what to believe?

This is a distinctively written novel which uses a metafictional framing device to pose questions about whether the protagonist lived a life of magic, abuse, or both. As with a lot of modern gothic novels, the gothic elements are there to be questioned as they seem to stand in for terrible realities, but also to feel like a fleshed out, supernatural world. The quirks of the narrative voice—from the bookending sections written as hypotheticals to elements of style and naming—create some of the atmosphere, particularly around the horror of Cassandra’s faerie companion, with whom she has a twisted relationship spanning her entire life. Don’t expect answers with this book: the ambiguities are purposefully there to leave the readers, both fictional and real, asking questions and wondering which stories were meant to be ‘true’ and what ‘true’ might even mean.

You Let Me In is a good example of how the use of supernatural can blur the line between ‘it was all people making it up’ and ‘the monsters were real’. It is a novel that self-consciously only gives the reader as much as the protagonist is being shown to want to share, and is a creepy story however you interpret the narrative. The gothic is a genre for using the imaginative work of the reader as part of the thrill, and that is what You Let Me In does, asking you to be Cassandra’s audience and consider the narrative options. This ambiguity won’t be for everyone, but it suits the novel and genre well.

Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982 by Cho Nam-Joo

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Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982 is a novel about a normal South Korean woman and the reasons why she starts acting strangely. Jiyoung’s life story isn’t anything unusual: the second daughter born to a family who wanted a boy, made to share a room with her sister while her younger brother has his own, a good student tormented by boys and male teachers at school, goes to university but doesn’t get put up for internships, and who is expected to give up everything else to become a mother. The book charts that life, up until the present day when, with a young daughter and a husband, she seems to have a breakdown. What has caused this to happen to Kim Jiyoung, and is her story more than just one person’s life?

The novel is being marketed as a sensation in South Korea now translated into English, and it is clear why is so: this is a book that uses the story of one woman to look at misogyny and systematic oppression on a large scale, raising important points using the everyday details of life. The narrative is fast-paced and descriptive, going through the stages in Jiyoung’s life and showing how they aren’t exceptional, but also feel in many ways inevitable, even without knowing that she ends up a depressed mother. Society has given her certain paths to take, and even her fighting against the rigid walls of these paths is contained, decisions both hers and not hers at all. These themes aren’t surprising, but the style of the narrative works to show how everyday it is and how it can wear women down.

This is a short book that makes powerful points about the institutions that contain South Korean women, and indeed women all over the world, using the lens of one character and her relatively usual life. It is both an insight into one country’s society and a reflection of many others, and it is clear why it has been so popular.

The Quarry by Ben Halls

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The Quarry is a collection of short stories all told by men and centred around a housing estate in West London. The Quarry Lane estate is a pretty generic estate: dodgy pub, club that changes name, bookies, and people dealing with lost families, addiction, sexuality, and relationships. The stories are all centred around the estate and the people who live there, with locations and people straying across stories and building up a picture both of modern Britain and of the different ways people from the same place live.

Short story collections can sometimes feel disjointed and not part of a whole, but this isn’t the case in The Quarry, which has a real focus and a sense that it could almost be a novel that just happens to only show small snippets of each person’s life. Some of the stories end with a twist or revelation and others are more meditative, like the postman returning to the estate he grew up on for the first time. Halls tells these characters’ stories in individual voices, trying to get across the sense of different ages and lives, but it comes together well in a way that makes the stories gripping rather than too fleeting or not fleshed out enough.

The Quarry is an impressive thing, as a short story collection that feels very much like a whole work. It is at its best when tackling things like addiction, but also very good at showing the ways that the male characters don’t realise what things are like for other people in their lives.

Swimming in the Dark by Tomasz Jedrowski

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Swimming in the Dark is a love story set in Communist era Poland, in which two young men meet one summer at agricultural camp, but then must return to the realities of the city. Ludwik is just graduating university and is worried about the future, both his and the country’s. When he meets Janusz they spend time adventuring through forests, swimming in lakes, and falling in love, but then they must return to Warsaw and their very different takes on their own lives.

This is a short, captivating novel that combines a love affair with the grim realities of living somewhere where people can’t get enough food, can’t get a doctor’s appointment, and where bribes and ‘contacts’ are how you get anywhere. It gives an insight into Poland’s history, but also a very personal look into a character full of anxieties and disillusionment. The narrative is told with hindsight, a classic method with a story of love and sacrifice, but the time gap is short so it feels more like reflection after the fact than looking back with nostalgia. Jedrowski combines a lot of detail and elements into a concise narrative that really focuses on Ludwik.

Swimming in the Dark is a Cold War era love story about life in a Communist country and realising you make very different choices even to someone you love. Readers will likely be drawn in by the love story, but then also get caught up in the tension and detail of the setting.