Flogging a Dead Horse
Mari Lwyd, Chepstow, by Mark Lewis
Folk Horror is very much in vogue at the moment – it’s on social media, on the airwaves, on the shelves, at the conferences and festivals, and probably lurking outside your door right now (I write this on Bonfire/Guy Fawkes Night, when penny-for-a-guying used to be a common folk custom). A few days ago we had ‘Halloween’ – the hand-me-down version of Samhain we celebrate instead of the real fire – and the programmers went into overdrive with Folk Horror content. It was a field day – presumably one with a giant wicker effigy in, awaiting your willing approach. So far, so Pagan. Yet it isn’t. If folklore is Pagan-lite (for the evening class dabblers); then Folk Horror is for the weekenders. Yet both sell short the true immersive paradigm of a magical reality, what Robert Macfarlane speculatively suggests is the ‘New Animism’, although in truth it is a way of being in the world as old as the oldest indigenous peoples. And even for a modern Pagan practitioner, a so-called ‘Neo-Pagan’ as academics like to pigeon-hole them, it is a more full-bloodied experience than just the odd quaint custom, or the mere glamorous aesthetics of pop culture Folk Horror – it is a holistic perception and ‘lifestyle’ that permeates everything one does. And it is certainly nothing new (under the sun). That is why it gets my goat (sacrificial, of course) when flavour-of-the-month authors like Andrew Michael Hurley (whose breakthrough The Loney is cited as the crest of the wave) are touted as the pioneers of this ‘new’ publishing phenomenon. Authors like Hurley, Sarah Perry (The Essex Serpent), Kate Mosse (The Mistletoe Bride and Other Stories) and others are sometimes defined as ‘Folk Realism’, but whatever you choose to call them I find them ultimately dissatisfying. They capitalise upon the atmospheric resonance of folklore, spirit of place, and so forth – but then explode the supernaturalism with rational explanations, reifying the status quo after an invigorating brush with the uncanny: it’s the literary equivalent of a ghost train ride. Meanwhile, writers who can conjure true magic on the page are few and far between: the much-missed Graham Joyce was one, with his distinctive, heady blend of the magical and the mundane (what he called ‘Old Peculiar’). The craftsmen and women of true fantasy are often not even called Fantasy writers, yet they quietly work away at forging enchantment on the page. And if I sound bitter and twisted and green with envy, it is because I feel I am one of them. Back in 1992-1994 I wrote my first (still unpublished) novel, The Ghost Tree, about my old home town of Northampton, the ‘dark heart of England’, as I call it – and it had all the tropes of Folk Horror: an ancient tree with a ghost trapped in its roots, sinister rituals, local secrets, witchcraft and dark magic. My second attempt at a novel, The Long Woman, a decade later, was published (Awen, 2004). And again, this homage to the fiction of MR James, Algernon Blackwood, Arthur Machen, and Dion Fortune, has all the classic ingredients of this ‘new’ trend. But will it get acknowledged within discussions of the wave? Unlikely. And that is telling of one of the most nefarious of occult cabals: the world of mainstream publishing, with their own priesthood, anointed ones, annual rites, and sacrifices. Let them hawk their shoddy effigies to the masses – and let those who know what true magic is find the hidden gems which sometimes smaller presses discover. For the reader/viewer/listener/festival-goer holds the power as to what is given life.
Copyright © Kevan Manwaring, 5th November 2019
