Help the Witch

October is the time of year for ghost stories and come the end of the month when the clocks go back then it feels like the right time to read them. This very latest book from Tom Cox is his first venture into fiction and there are ten short stories from him in here that venture from ghost stories to a modern take on stories that we have heard time and time again.

Beginning with Help the Witch, a tale of a guy who has just moved into an old house in early December and is shortly snowed in. Not is all that it seems though, even though he has just split from his girlfriend, Chloe, he starts to hear voices around the house, voices that answer him back. Listings is an unusual take on a story, it is told through the small ads that you see in show more the local paper, and tell of a modern executive home with a cave underneath.

For a surreal take on the world, then you might like his nine tiny stories about houses, or the ghostly sighting on a speed awareness course, where a guy meets his uncle who he hasn’t seen in ages. Or there is the Pool, a place where teenagers swim in the summer and when they have all left is revealed as the home of something ancient that emerges from the depths as winter breaks. There are more like this, stories that exist in the gloaming moments of the day and on the liminal fringes of our culture.

Just Good Friends was probably my favourite of all of the short stories in this book, it manages to be both normal and very unnerving at the same time. Folk horror can be properly scary, probably because it is deeply rooted in our own psyche, but most of the stories in here I didn’t find that frightening. Rather the stories were eerie and often unnerving and even had proper goose-bumps moments too. Cox is a quality writer, prepared to explore different things in different ways and seeking unconventional ways around subjects. I loved his 21st Century Yokel and this is great stuff too. The cover of this is quite distinctive too, the figure that is tree-like is quite chilling and the gold foil makes it a striking book. show less

A very enjoyable collection of short stories, drawing on folklore and ghosts. They're written in a very original style, and in authentic voices of the various characters who narrate the stories. My favourite stories were “Help the Witch”, “Folk Tales of the Twenty-third Century”, and “An Oral History of Margaret and the Village by Matthew and Five Others”. A couple of stories were a bit weaker than the rest, but that's inevitable in a collection. I think this is an excellent book and would definitely recommend it to anyone who likes folklore and/or slightly creepy stories.