Descend into Folk Horror Summer
Have you been yearning for flower crowns, pagan rituals, and harvest festivals? Perhaps you’re in the mood for village cults, old gods, and oral histories. If you’ve nodded your head to everything I’ve just mentioned, you might be hankering for a Folk Horror Summer! But what is folk horror fiction? You're probably more familiar with folk tales which encompass myths, fairytales, fables, and legends — Johnny Appleseed, Hansel and Gretel, or Little Red Riding Hood to name a few. But folk horror as a literary genre takes cultural lore and spotlights themes of religion, sacrifice, isolation, and/or nature to tell a scary story, invoke fear, and stir up anxiety.
A good example of isolation and nature themes could be found in the quiet horror of Shirley Jackson's short story The Summer People (Shirley Jackson: Novels and Stories), in which a well-to-do, retired couple from the city decide to break with tradition and extend their annual summer stay in a lakeside cottage past Labor Day. This decision elicits a subtle warning from the local townies who view the non-local vacationers as outsiders — "Nobody ever stayed at the lake past Labor Day before... Nobody."
Folk horror can be the unsettling uncanny in everyday people. It is isolation putting you at the mercy of Mother Nature. Folk horror is the hag in the woods, the keepers of old traditions, the annual sacrifice to the ancients in exchange for good crops, the hungry spirits of the Earth demanding reverence. Folk horror is a warning to never whistle at night or a chance encounter with the devil at the crossroads. It's the consequence of what happens when the dead are not appeased through proper rites. It's the danger of hearing your name called from the shadows of deep, dark forests. It's an oral tradition on how to keep witches away or a song of mischievous demons come to steal your newborn babe in the night. Folk horror can be quiet and subtle, such as in The Summer People, or it can be downright bone-chilling! If you’ve watched horror films like The Wicker Man (1973), The Witch (2015), or Midsommar (2019), then you’re already pretty acquainted with folk horror and might enjoy it in literature! And so I, your spooky librarian, am here to give a few recommendations!
5 Folk Horror Book Recs
“The outside world came into Withered Hill infrequently, but it did come. And it had learned, somewhere along the way, to not question what went on in Withered Hill, or the ways of its people.”
In this story, a young woman by the name of Sophie stumbles naked out of the woods into a small village with no memory of her own identity. She’s greeted by the friendly locals of Withered Hill, who keep a practice of old pagan ways, and tell Sophie she is welcome to stay, but they must now keep her in Withered Hill. Feeling she is a prisoner, Sophie attempts escape after escape, only to find herself trapped. But is it the amiable villagers who are keeping her here, or could it perhaps be something more ancient preventing her from crossing the boundary of the deep woods back into the outside world?
This non-linear folkloric novel written by British author David Barnett is wonderfully intricate, unsettling, and darkly bewitching!
“Antonia had read a book at school when she was small. It was called One Two Three & Away, and it was about a river that you could only cross via a line of white stepping-stones. But you mustn’t ever step on the black stepping-stone, everyone said, otherwise something terrible would happen. And Almanby was a bit like that. All other villages were fine to visit, but Almanby was the black stepping-stone.”
Three young women embark on a road trip to the English village of Almanby. Crafty, cunning Rachel is tasked with delivering a package. Whimsical, flighty Heather is on a rescue mission to find her missing boyfriend, and aspiring stand-up comedienne Antonia serves as designated driver, going simply because she’s in love with Heather. The three of them have knowingly signed up for danger, because no one is ever supposed to go to Almanby, a place shrouded in mystery. Those who go, never come back. To make matters even stranger, the world is trapped in an eternal summer, the dead (called “ghosts”) have risen from their graves for absolutely no reason at all and are shambling through neighborhoods, villages, and the countryside beating people to death, and there’s a local lore known as the fearsome Green Woman. Could Almanby have something to do with all of it? What's certain is that the closer our characters get to their ominous destination, the weirder the road trip becomes.
This book has all the ingredients of an A24 film with a delirium not unlike Shirley Jackson’s Haunting of Hill House. It’s dizzying, beautiful, melancholic, humorous, unsettling, haunting, eerie, vibrant. In spite of it being nearly 500 pages, the chapters are short and author Adam S. Leslie’s writing is alluring as well as easy to fall into. If you’re looking for a book about a dreamy road trip with an ominous journey’s end, you’ve found it!
“What you go searching for and what you find aren’t always the same.”
When the The Willoughbys, Richard and Juliette, lose their only child to an accident, they find strange ways of grieving. The father spends time in the barren fields, digging for the roots of a long-gone tree called Olde Justice, while the mother grieves by staying indoors and meeting with a strange group of occultists known as the Beacons. Neither realize they’ve unearthed and awakened something ancient and sinister, and it all begins with exhumed rabbit bones.
This quietly unsettling story unfolds non-linearly, bouncing back and forth between past and present while revealing pieces of a dark puzzle long left unsolved. Readers who are compelled by one-sitting reads, marital secrets, grief narratives, and small English village settings might consider this to be author Michael Andrew Hurley's best work! There is also a film adaptation of this book worth checking out in our catalog!
“Some people believe in God, I suppose, and some people believe in nothing…And some people believe in something else.”
Taking place during the heatwave of 1976, sixteen year old Jennifer (Nif) and her family journey to the Welsh countryside for a fresh start and to escape the grief and loss of Nif's baby sister. Throughout the story, the tragedy of the baby's death haunts Nif’s parents, creating a dysfunctional family environment and a gradual emotional unravelling. Nif herself practices her own form of witchcraft she calls The Creed — a belief that the universe demands balance. If a bad thing happens, she feels she must cancel out the negative energy by repeating said bad thing. She collects “relics” in nature — birds’ eggs and bones — and when she finds said relics in a certain order, she interprets it as spiritual affirmation from The Creed. When Nif befriends Mally, the neighbor boy who takes an interest in her, they form a bond over secret rites. But with the summer heat, comes a hazy, ominous spell over Nif and her family.
This is a leisurely-paced, coming-of-age, folk horror with accumulating unease. The plot progresses slowly like a lazy, hot summer day. But readers will relish in the chill of foreboding.
“The Riddance is a form of madness. I’ve always thought it. Purification through chaos.”
Mina is a newly licensed child psychologist who accepts an invitation from a journalist to investigate the alarming case of a teenage girl alleged to be haunted by a witch. Seeing this as an opportunity to gain experience in the psychology field, Mina arrives in the small village of Banathel where she learns that it’s not just the young girl, Alice, who fears a supernatural malevolence. The entire village is heedful of old superstitions and has a dark history of performing a ritual called the Riddance — a means to rid the town of evil. Could the escalating fears of witchcraft be a matter of collective paranoia within the town? Are the voices Alice hears in the walls real or a sign of psychological disorder?
The pacing for this story was excellent, unravelling little clues to this creepy mystery one chapter at a time. Themes of grief, poverty, mental illness, and small town superstitions/traditions are weaved in seamlessly. The audience will love how this book simultaneously reads like a paranormal mystery and a horror story.
Haunting Honorable Mentions
Need more folk horror to fill your summer days? Here are some honorable mentions in both fiction and film:
FOLK HORROR IN FICTION
SILK & SINEW: A COLLECTION OF FOLK HORROR FROM THE ASIAN DIASPORA
FOLK HORROR IN FILM
—Christina James is a Readers' Services Assistant at Lawrence Public Library.
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