In the opener, Chairs, the unnamed narrator prepares for an impending storm by stacking sandbags around the ground floor of the place where he runs a meeting of Narcotics Anonymous. As a recovered addict, there’s a clear drive to ensure the meeting happens, as if helping others is a new – albeit cleaner – habit. Like addiction, where the shadow of a relapse always looms, one has to prepare for the worst in order to survive. Beyond this space, there are hints of both a gentrifying Mexico City – where a hipster pulquería rubs shoulders with a grubby sex shop – and a wider continent still nursing the wounds, as charted by Eduardo Galeano’s Open Veins of Latin America (1971), of its colonial past (‘Europe is the incision through which the whole continent is bleeding to death.’). 

Satellite goes deeper into institutional corruption while reckoning with the burden of guilt. Alejandro, a marine-turned-cop, travels to witness a satellite fall to earth. Events along the way trigger the unfurling of his suppressed past, which comes crashing down from the dark orbit of his mind. It’s a rather brutal story, spare in its grim details, but haunting long after its conclusion. That Juan Rulfo’s 1955 classic, Pedro Páramo, is namechecked comes as little surprise, for this is a story where the living and the dead also collide.  

As the city reels from a recent earthquake in Better, we find Diego lying in his wrecked apartment, strewn with needles and booze, contemplating whether this cosmic shake was necessary for going straight. Although not the main focus of Cleaner – which follows a crime scene cleaner and callbacks to a past affair – Diego’s repeat appearance suggests this isn’t just a collection of stories, but a loose sequence. And as his cameos continue, sometimes tangential, other times prominent, it’s not hard to imagine him as MacGabhann’s literary alter-ego. As he crawls from addiction and expresses himself in new ways – following an encounter with figurines holding blank slates in Chefs – redemption seems earned rather than assured. Indeed, a person has to remain in control as addictions can never truly be conquered.

But Saints isn’t without its other damaged souls, though their stories overlap with Diego’s in interesting ways. In Beach, a woman released from prison attempts off-grid living, where she encounters an American who fled from America during a febrile 1973. And in Dive a journalist who longs to write about the gruesome details of the city’s murders instead finds value in the stories of a survivor.

Title story Saints is that of Veronica, told in first person, about two women who have lost sons. That one offers to repair a Mayan figurine for the other, poorer woman, shows their grief as a leveller over any other barrier that divides them. It’s indicative of the balance that runs through these stories, where one thing always offsets the other, whether that be the stories’ events and their metaphor, similar experiences that repel alignment, or, as  in the book’s closer, Bodies, familiar siblings find a way forward through their own problems.

The nine stories in Saints, with their single-word titles, give nothing away about MacGabhann’s style. Yet there’s a certain lightness to his prose that counters its heavier content, all parcelled up in a hardboiled wrapper. Despite moments where slipping between questionable and objective realities or hopscotching through timelines warrants a double take due to abrupt shifts, the book offers a smooth ride, navigating both the lives of its people and the bruised terrain of their setting, a Mexico that is heavily corrupt and deadly, but also lightly built from the merest mentions; an Oxxo store here, a plate of chilaquiles there, a drive to Coatzacoalcos. That it doesn’t impose place with bulky detail reinforces the colonial undertone: such impositions only happen in one direction. 

Though one story references The Lives of the Saints, and their painful deaths, as a religious thread through the book, the real saints of this book are in no way holy; they’re just humans making do in a rotten world. For all that life throws at them – be it addictions, loss, or mental collapse – there are opportunities for redemption. Disasters, death, and drugs may form the fabric from which these enjoyable tales are woven, but their interwoven patterns depict hope.

Any continuation of that narrative is instantly dismissed as, in a foreword of free and terse verse, Nordenhof discusses the issues of telling T’s life story when, if saying he would kill for profit, there’s little else to say about him. The Devil Book is therefore its own thing (“an erotic thriller / about businessmen and / the devil”). Helpfully – or unhelpfully – she adds “it will be your job / to make it fit / into the series.”

Where the first installment’s narrator went unnamed, this time we have the name Olivia, which puts us squarely into autofiction territory. The aforementioned businessmen are T, who offers her a job away from the brothel she works in, and, over ten years later, an unnamed host who, following a chance meeting, invites her to spend time in his high-rise apartment in London. This being at the height of Covid means she would have to spend two weeks quarantining; the perfect situation in which to write her book about T. 

Nordenhof’s narrative continues, casual and chatty, its chapters marked by the days, flitting between the time in the apartment and her time with T. Both situations, unusual as they are, see the men in powerful positions, offering her everything she needs. Money is the culprit, the dynamics unbalanced between those it liberates and those isolated for the lack of it. But her suggestion that T may be the Devil, a personification of mammon, adds a lightly metaphysical touch. The story of Goethe’s Faust, which she discovers, seems to align with her own.

But this account, titled The Devil in a High-Rise, is just one of ‘Four Attempts to Answer the Question of Whether It Is Possible to Love under Capitalism’. Others (Open Houses and Winter Cabin) continue the foreword’s poetic style, while between them sits The Devil Speaks from the Madhouse, an account of her time receiving therapy. The poems, while often more blunt than the prose, feel somewhat opaque with moments of hard-hitting clarity. As a combination, they return to Money To Burn’s anger at the structures built by a capitalist society, this time at the value ascribed to a life, an actuarial coldness that can presume to calculate the value of a person in care or the compensation of a loved one.

Although the first ‘attempt’ is both the longest and most engaging, the story sparkles with pain and anger as it probes love (sexual, parental) and attempts to sustain it within existing frameworks. When Olivia decides to “castrate the narrative arc”, it’s as much to the story being told as it is to the symbiosis of capitalism and patriarchy. In one poem she writes “there is nothing made / we can’t unmake / if we want to and / there are enough of us”, but doesn’t provide a replacement for a dismantled capitalism. And, if nothing, then whether love is also possible in that vacuum.

Despite its succinct anger, I think I preferred Money To Burn over The Devil Book. This second volume, with its more experimental pieces, is a more challenging stepping stone to whatever conclusion Nordenhof has planned and its poetry’s more ponderous moments are less engaging. It’s obviously a book that rewards rereading as its ideas bubble away and the dialogue between its sections finds greater clarity with each exploration. That is to say, the devil is in its details. But one can only truly judge its place in the series when all seven titles are available for that greater dialogue.

When it opens, there’s an echo of The Wicker Man (1973, dir: Robin Hardy) as its two detectives arrive by boat to find seemingly expectant locals. Unlike the film’s search for a missing person, these coppers are tasked with investigating a teenage suicide and assessing whether the cause of death might not be self-inflicted after all.

Detective Inspector Georgina Lennox—known as George—is returning to duty after being hospitalised for her gung-ho attitude to crime fighting, though she’s now hiding an addiction to opioids, a subplot that, unless expected to expand into future books, doesn’t really conclude. Acting as chaperone to his high-flying colleague is Richie Stewart, of similar rank but whose career, marked by fewer achievements, is now nearing its end. They are friends, in and out of work, but tensions also underpin their relationship.

The Wolf Tree is a police procedural, with Lennox and Richie working their way through prominent islanders in search of an elusive truth. While there’s an obvious suspicion of “mainland scum”, there’s also the menacing hint that the islanders’ reticence to speak may stem from coercion by unknown forces. Yet Eilean Eadar also harbours a historical mystery—nodding to the geographically similar Flannan Isles, where three lighthouse keepers disappeared in 1900—with Lennox invited to review, in her downtime, the surviving notebooks of this island’s missing keepers.

Despite being packaged like a thriller, McLuskey’s novel is more a slow-burn investigation shining its light into the darker recesses of island life. It nicely veers into light gothic (how could it not in such a setting?) and pleasantly hints at folk horror, with its island too remote even for the Scottish Reformation and so the old ways prevail under the cloak of Catholicism. It’s perhaps trying to do too much, taking in other genres in its central pursuit of the truth, though these genres’ atmospheric touches are greatly appreciated.

For me, the book’s biggest problem is its dialogue. It’s functional: people speak and what they say is natural in content—but so little of it feels Scottish. McLuskey, an Australian, hints at “the lyrical patterns of Gaelic” or rare moments of dialect (‘my da”; “wee barra”; “shite”). The characters rarely banter, and this flatness undercuts both the texture and realism of the setting. Perhaps this is a gripe that would only be observed by a native, but in this case it always felt at one remove from reality.

Although it doesn’t set the world (or its police) alight, The Wolf Tree is a decently plotted mystery that keeps us guessing, helped in part because its mysterious title only becomes evident toward the end. Despite reservations over its Caledonian credentials, McLuskey’s descriptive writing feels assured, although her main characters come across as less interesting than the supporting cast. If this is to be the first in a series of ongoing appearances for Lennox, then they will definitely benefit from deeper immersion in the their setting—and hopefully sharper dialogue will come from it.

The opener, Flying in the Rain, is an outright science-fiction story that sees G tell his counsellor of a trip back to Earth. With all its talk of greenhouses, plants, and oxygen, it feels very in message, but with talk of returning to the home planet and with an Interplanetary Union, one wonders if it is also a veiled exploration of how those who escape North Korea can find themselves overwhelmed by the future shock of the South and yearn to return.

The following story, Imperfect Pitch, explores human connections over the internet. Baek hangs around on a site dedicated to the disbanded group named in the title, and finds himself drawn to the mysterious O, a superfan knowledgeable about all things related to the band. When he receives a message informing him about O’s death, he recalls the time she sold him a ticket to see them overseas and yet, even then, never got to meet her. Like Baek’s obsession with the band, his similar focus on this unknowable person stifles his real-world relationships.

Paper Cut is an absurd tale that imagines bureaucracy incarnate, and is my favourite story from the collection. A is regularly visited by a man made from paper, who swallows files and dishes out blank pages, regularly enquiring as to whether A has written his statement, whatever that is. Despite its energetic nonsense, it remains vague enough to allow for other interpretations, such as the paper man embodying writer’s block.

Two stories bear similar titles, Failed Summer Vacation and Ruined Winter Holiday. Both are less interested in the external world but take a psychological turn, heading into the minds of unnamed narrators. If the former tends to a bitter monologue, driven by claustrophobia and too much time to oneself, the latter is more concerned about addressing someone who can no longer be addressed. These stories were less engaging to me due to their self-absorbed delivery.

The remaining tales venture into the book’s more surreal moments. In Loaf Cake, the narrator’s partner, Sand, has left and while she waits, week after week, for him to return, she buys him a cake at a local cafe, which she devours slice after slice, necessitating the purchase of a new one each time. But her burgeoning relationship with the cake seller, Snow, is one thing to her and another to him. And when Sand finally returns, it just gets odd. Equally unusual is Shard, in which two-dimensional triangles fall upon the planet without explanation, in a story that also involves buying a dog and a past incident while the narrator worked as a stagehand, where watching from the sidelines, she saw the world in a different way from others.

Given how oblique these stories can be, I found myself reading them multiple times, trying to find my way in; pulling at suggested threads and chasing its phantoms. With many characters and places often out of reach, it feels like deliberately pushing away the reader with one hand yet beckoning them to read again in the hope of greater clarity. The alienation that emanates from these pages sometimes feels not just the theme but the book’s very aim. This summer vacation is an uneasy getaway, less reliant on relaxation than baggage.

The title has more than a whiff of marketing strategy behind it, as if aimed squarely at the nascent TV book club trend at the time. The original Norwegian title, Hoggerne (‘The Loggers’), feels more appropriate for a book more interested in its people than its titular town. Indeed, the English title seems a disconnect from a crucial metaphor that likens men to trees in that both can be felled during war.

Set in 1939 Finland, this is the relatively quiet story of Timo, a logger who stays on while his village is evacuated and razed. While some consider him a fool for remaining, he’s more canny than he lets on, and over the course of the Winter War (a brief conflict between Finland and the Soviets) he works with Soviet POWs to fell trees for the occupying forces. But is his act ultimately one of treason or simply survival?

Through Timo, Jacobsen explores resilience during war and comradeship among supposed enemies and across language barriers while capturing the sorts of small moments in war unrecorded by the larger historical narrative. But, with plain characters, little introspection, and barely any narrative propulsion, it’s all so damned plodding and uninteresting: you carry on reading only for fear of being shot for desertion. 

Reading about the historical Battle of Suomussalmi, notable for its remarkable Finnish victory against the Soviet Goliath, it’s a shame that in the theatre of war, all the real action takes place offstage. However, across its story Timo boldly navigates the war, helping other loggers survive alongside him before they go their separate ways. The novel’s coda – a quiet fizzle – offers a moment for reflection: even once war ends, those like Timo who experienced it need time to find their own peace.

Detective Elizabeth Burnet is the titular Friday Girl. Having once done a newspaper feature in her police uniform (“Here’s a lass doing a job. Isn’t she pretty? See another one tomorrow.”) she’s the pin-up of the station. For a woman who “just wants to be polis”, it’s an awkward set-up at a time – the late 1970s – when sexism was rife and, if a woman was needed on a case it was “because someone’s got to make a cup of tea on this one!”. It’s likely no coincidence that this theme’s exploration is positioned the year before Margaret Thatcher would become the first woman to occupy the country’s highest attainable office.

But sexism isn’t the only rot in the Tayside Police: corruption is everywhere. Cops are on the take and investigations are mysteriously closed down. Burnet, with her hunches, is ignored and her partner in (solving) crime, Kelley, a second-generation copper, is convinced his late father may have secrets tucked away. All roads lead back to a local kingpin with enough sway to ensure the constabulary look the other way when crimes are afoot. And there’s certainly no shortage of misdeeds underway, whether that be a spate of robberies or the new wave of criminals being roughed up as Frank Gray, an ex-gangster once known as the Beast of Balgay, falls back into the game.

And what crime novel wouldn’t be without a killer on the loose? While it feels more secondary to the institutional concerns, it ties in with the wider story arc and doesn’t feel forced. Very loosely based on some unsolved crimes from Dundee’s past (the Templeton Woods murders) someone is out there killing people and with a calling card distinctive enough to earn the moniker ‘the Werewolf’. Being set in the 1970s, the investigation allows for some dramatic ironies (“What use was hair to anyone at a crime scene?”) and often sees a reliance more on feasibility and supposition than proper plodwork.

There’s a lot going on in The Friday Girl, all of it tightly plotted and delivered in a hardboiled style that feels frugal yet impressively distills people – their thoughts and movements – into just a few words.  With the economy of Elmore Leonard and the dark grit of David Peace, McLean is wrapping his noir over Dundee. Though the clipped style captures its characters well, it leaves the city somewhat less memorable, functioning more as a catalogue of places rather than a fully-realised character. But as is noted, “There’s the official public-facing city, and then there’s something like a shadow city where the real world happens.” and it’s what happens in these darker spots that truly counts.

Burnet’s efforts to be taken seriously as a detective rather than a woman provide a key journey through The Friday Girl, while Kelley tackles his father’s record and the interplay of Gray’s family life and criminal past lead to unexpected struggles of conscience. While I’m not sure if Burnet is intended to be an ongoing character, she’s certainly put herself in a position of competence meaning future investigations may not see being a “bubbly” beauty as a barrier to police work. “Dundee creates strong women,” the story says, and McLean has one in The Friday Girl.

Folk Horror, as a subgenre, is typically where ancient customs cling to the rural landscape; where an isolated outsider falls into the nightmare of superstitious tradition. The first chapter strays from that, opening in London on a boozy last bash with the girls. The chapter’s curious subtitles of ‘Outside’ and ‘Days to Withered Hill: 30’ suggest we have time to observe our outsider, thirty-two-year-old Sophie Wickham, the last woman standing from a group of settled-down friends.

Just as we’ve gotten to know Sophie, we’re already in Withered Hill. 357 days in! Here, in this strange woodland village somewhere in Lancashire, Sophie is told she can leave, a sentiment that chimes with the book’s opening sentence (“Everyone leaves eventually.”) — quite the curveball. And no sooner have we gotten used to this Sophie, the narrative switches timeline again to Sophie’s first day in the village, arriving naked and confused, guided in by residents wearing masks of pigs and hares.

Once settled into these changing timelines, the story becomes a delightful and suspenseful pagan braid, each strand overlapping the other in service to the whole. The mystery becomes not just how will Sophie get to Withered Hill, but how she will adapt to it once there, and how she will endeavour to leave.

There’s no denying that Withered Hill leans heavily into its plot-driven structure, offering a fast-paced thriller rather than any deeper journey. The prose is tight, functional, and streamlined, serving its suspenseful mode very well. The narrative is continually raising questions while the drip feed of what’s actually going on reveals nothing until it’s prudent to do so. All rather well done I think, given the three narrative strands’ potential to reveal earlier details.

At its heart the story is environmental, with the people of Withered Hill dismissive of those outside its influence. There, they follow the seasons in the old ways in service of a folkloric entity known as Owd Hob. In truth it often feels more folk fantasy than folk horror, but there’s definitely a few scenes that belong in the latter.

Barnett’s story is highly propulsive, for those willing to go along with it. There are times when certain elements – especially in the chicklit to conspiracy sections – where the plotting feels too visible and the characters too bare-boned in service of the plot. And other times in Withered Hill where the unhelpful villagers surrounding Sophie can get a bit repetitive in their unwillingness to directly assist. But overall it’s a dark popcorn, compulsively readable, mysterious, and leaves you craving more when it’s over.

What can be conveyed by a single word? The first entry is ‘Bird’, and we’re left to ponder what could be meant by this. Is a real bird being referenced, or something else? An illustration, perhaps. Things remain unclear – each day is new, after all – but more references to birds abound as the month unfolds with mentions of a hawk and a woodpecker, and “Dawn birds full of rumours: / giddy, indiscreet.”

As the months roll on, we start to see glimpses of the author’s life – friends; cats; an interest perhaps in churches; a comfort in music. At one point doubt creeps into the project. (“Is this project faltering? As engagement, it meets its book, but what fails is its soil: what muted emptiness you try to muscle pleasure from—“). This teasing out of a character from behind the often unrelated entries is vaguely reminiscent of David Markson’s Notecard quartet

What we really learn about the writer is his appreciation of the natural world, of being among it and feel the disappointment of a few days’ rain and being stuck indoors (“I have lost my connection to the outer world of nature.”). How the world is processed and presented is enjoyable: Broad beans’ “green skin, slick as eyelids“ and “flung rain” are nicely evocative. That the month of October is spent almost exclusively meditating on a spider and her web (“giant’s fingerprint”) shows that it’s not all random musings; the impressionist mode is cumulative.

Though there’s a steady progression through the year, it’s hard to call it a narrative. But the pleasure is in taking each entry and giving it room for consideration. Not every entry landed with me, but I certainly appreciate those that gave me insights or made me consider the world from a new angle, such as the restlessness of a hand (“At rest— what is it you’re not holding?”) or, having attended an avant-garde gallery (“I spoke to no one yet felt home.”).

Those passages that stir something are mere flashes in the arc of the book’s year. Some are perhaps too personal or too oblique to see the journal unfold easily to an outsider. But it’s an interesting mix of observations and admissions – of nature’s cycle; of human aging, respectively – that looks to multiple modes of expression, be that the poetry where doors “slam gunshot shut”, an impromptu haiku, or , in lines like “music can parse rain”, a ponderable observation.

Each entry, their potential expanding with each day, opens themselves up to this sort of experimentation, keeping things fresh as the journal progresses. And when the end of March approaches, as the experiment comes also to its conclusion, there’s a satisfying few days of reflection that assess the project itself and the spending of time. “Did you enjoy yourself? Walsh asks himself. His reply; “Less than half the time.” Can the same be said by myself? A little more, maybe; just about.

Nordenhof’s critique of laissez-faire economics surfaces around a third into the novel, brief but impactful. However, her alignment of the tragedy in human terms with her thematic concerns finds an oblique entry point in the lives of an older Danish couple, Kurt and Maggie, sometime in the late 80s. Kurt is an introvert, uncomfortable in his skin, but he has made modest steps in life, notably the founding of his small bus company in a bid to be his own boss. The novel mostly focuses on Maggie, whose earliest memory is of a wartime bunker, emerging, like the rest of the world, into a post-war economic boom. But the spoils of this growth appear thin on the ground. The struggles they face, financially and socially, play into the broader ideas of how systems can promise opportunity and yet fail to deliver: personal battles reflect the crushing of all the passengers’ lives in the larger mechanisms surrounding money.

Nordenhof’s omniscient narrator (presumably Nordenhof herself) jumps around her characters’ lives, forward and back. In short chapters, she delivers fractured vignettes that capture key moments in their stories. There’s a certain freedom to a young Maggie’s boarding of a train to Rome while penniless, but her initial blagging of hotels turns to brief relationships sees her accrue unbearable episodes. Through her early years, Maggie experiences homelessness, sexual abuse, and – (“A man’s face was a hole from which money could be drawn.”) – other humiliations. Though she survives it all,  years later she hopes her daughter, Sofie, will earn her own money and have no need of a man.

The man Maggie needs is, of course, Kurt. He’s a broken man, emotionally unstable, controlling, and, at this human level, the patriarchy. His own insecurities and disappointments fuel his ill temper, and assert his power. But when Nordenhof scratches at his surface, later in the book, we get to see another person harshly treated by life, another everyman in the grind of capitalist structures that own us, be that via banks, utilities, or marketing. By bringing the thematic concerns of the ferry disaster down to a personal level, Nordenhof is showing us the systems we live in and that everyone is exploitable and collateral, not only to the wealthier powers above them, but to each other. People aren’t affected for an idea: “In order for one group to profit, somebody and something else may have to die. That is the idea.”

Stylistically, Nordenhof’s prose is definitely poetic in its concise captures. Each paragraph stands alone, saying only what needs to be said. When accounting Kurt and Maggie, the narration is detached but still wrings out emotion from our natural empathy. And when pursuing its wider themes it’s positively charged, engagingly propulsive that sometimes it can come as a shock when a line appears that makes you stop and reflect, like “Money is a space that extends far beyond the capacity for pain.”

Its heartfelt anger at capitalism’s capacity to infect lives does warrant the question: what’s the viable alternative and how do we get there? Perhaps such answers will come in one of the further six titles, each listed out at the back of the book, with tantalising names like ‘Maria, Atlantis’, ‘Ideas 2’, and ‘Jørgen Is Scarified. For now, Nordenhof is highlighting struggles within its overarching structure. While Money To Burn is a standalone work, it’s an interesting beginning to what seems an ambitious project, wherever it may be headed.

As openers go, C.J. Tudor’s Butterfly Island is a high-octane thriller in miniature. It brings a boatload of characters onto a mysterious tropical island and involves so many plot points in its seventeen pages that it’s hard not to feel like it’s the trimmings from some larger work. With bountiful sarcasm and comic stylings (“Kaboom!”) it never really won me over, but it at least set me up to be wrong-footed by the contributions that followed.

Tim Lebbon’s Research raised a smile by exploring the familiar idea that horror writers are nice because they expunge their darkness on the page. Here a writer is kidnapped and, prevented from writing, observed to see what happens. Another writer, in Ramsey Campbell’s assured Wherever You Look, discovers at a reading that his canon shows signs of being influenced by a short story he read as a child and no longer recalls. This sends him on a mission to read it once more and exorcise its influence, but its psychological effect drags him deeper into darker places. Allusive and perhaps somewhat autobiographical, it’s ultimately unsettling.

If Campbell’s story feels vague to some, then Catriona Ward’s A Hotel In Germany may be lost to many. It’s a deliciously odd study of love and servitude told through the relationship of Cara and ‘the movie star’. The ambiguity of Cara – petlike, sentient, obedient, and almost ageless – brings a whole layer of mystery to this seemingly symbiotic couple, and the world beyond the hotel, fleetingly glimpsed – is tantalisingly speculative. Similarly, Alison Littlewood’s Swanskin is another story wonderfully enclosed in its mythology. A slow-burn exploration of gender roles in a fishing village, it’s a spin on the swan maiden folklore that slips off its feather robe for a ghastly conclusion. 

Being horror, such endings are often anticipated. Simon Bestwick’s We All Come Home, a tale of one man returning to his childhood trauma, is a solid piece of writing though its conclusion has a sense of having seen it all before. The Mirror House by Jonathan Robbins Leon, the story of an unhappy marriage as a woman realises she’s a box-ticking exercise to her older husband is suitably creepy though its ending feels predictable. Ditto Murder Board by Grady Hendrix. Farcical and familiar, here a Ouija board leads to disaster when a message, interpreted in one way, is more ambiguous. It’s a pacy piece of plotting, but also surface-level stuff and rather forgettable. 

Any anthology is bound to contain some run-of-the-mill stories like that (admittedly, it’s all personal taste) and After Sundown is no exception. That’s the Spirit by Sarah Lotz is one such tale; the story of a fraudulent medium who may be regaining powers. It’s nicely character-driven but fairly conventional and, if it surprises, then it will only once. Thana Niveau’s Bokeh has a child acting strange with imaginary friends while processing her parents’ split. I thought its unusual representation of the fae in the shapeless unfocused regions of a photograph was great but overall it’s not a particularly interesting story.

But where some stories don’t deliver, others come out swinging. In The Importance of Oral Hygiene, Robert Shearman has one woman writing to another to warn her about the dentist she’s visiting. It’s a fun, tight, and grotesque piece of body horror set in the 19th century featuring a debauched indulgence in nitrous oxide. Stephen Volk’s The Naughty Step is a bleaker affair as a social worker arrives at a crime scene to help escort a young boy, banished to the titular step before witnessing his mother’s murder, and unwilling to leave without her permission. It’s devastating stuff, well-observed, and its characterisation oozes frustration, compassion, and trauma. More domestic horror is found in Michael Marshall Smith’s It Doesn’t Feel Right, which grows out of the most mundane of situations: a man getting his child ready for school each day and the kid fighting back at having to wear uncomfortable socks.

If socks don’t feel right, then I felt the same way about Laura Purcell’s use of a journal in Creeping Ivy to deliver the story. It’s a gothic story with its dilapidated manor, dead wife, uncanny botanics, and hints of madness. The entries just read like a regular narrative, despite an opening gambit that observes they supposedly get more scrawled as they go on, though those scribblings do produce a nice conclusion. Rick Cross, in his Last Rites for the Fourth World, opts for ending where he began in this matryoshka of a story, like a Cloud Atlas in miniature. Environmental in theme, I found it rather dull in its imagining an end to the current crop of folkloric entities. Similarly speculative, and with a more ambiguous apocalypse, was Michael Bailey’s Gave, which jumps back through the key moments of one man’s life as he gives blood to save humanity. It flows nicely but doesn’t provide much of a chill.

If giving blood voluntarily is horrific, then spare a thought for the cast of Lewis Carrol’s Wonderland in the sanguine pages of John Langan’s Alice’s Rebellion which opens with many of their heads on sticks. It’s an overtly political piece, a dark fantasy that imagines Tweedledee and Tweedledum having found power in our world. The blatant comparisons to two tousled-hair blonde leaders of the day feel, even just a few years later, dated. Its central theme is more universal in questioning revolutions, their martyrs, and who will rise from such sacrifices to make the world sensible again. But for some, such as the ghost in Angela Slatter’s Same Time Next Year, the world she haunts can never be sensible as its memory comes to her in incompatible fragments. Like her, we never really get to see her life in full, and can only speculate with the hints given, making it a nicely paced tale with room for reflection.

There’s reflection too in Mine Seven by Elena Gomel, as a woman comes to terms with her roots. But this is also an enjoyable creature feature, touching on climate change and natural resources, set in the icy desolation of Svalbard. It’s well done, in plot and pace. That the monster stalking the island comes from Chukchi folklore makes it an interesting and educational experience.

Boys of a certain age in 1970s Britain are likely to have had a different sort of educational experience when ‘mucky mags’ were passed around like currency. This rite of passage forms the backbone of Paul Finch’s Branch Line, which is half a coming-of-age tale and equally a ghost story. Delivered like an interview, recalling the time when one boy went missing, the interviewee tells his side of the story about his relationship with his old companion as they walked, Stand By Me style, along a railway line in north-west England. It’s a nostalgic piece and captures a somewhat lost era. And its ending is a fitting way to end not just the story but also this fun and varied collection.

Set in both 1930s and 1960s Switzerland, at a grand hotel, the book sees its later period shattered by the arrival of a letter from America harking back to the earlier time. The letter is from Jakob, a German man whom Erneste had, when they were in their early twenties, trained, shared a room with, and experienced his only true love. This at a time where the consequences of their relationship would have been disastrous.

But what is love for one person is but an indulgence for another as a sort of love triangle develops with the arrival of a well-to-do guest. Julius Klinger is a writer of great repute, tipped for the Nobel, and effectively a veiled Thomas Mann, who made a similar exodus with his family to Switzerland and then to America, escaping the increasingly perilous nature over the border in the Third Reich. Erneste’s life is shattered when he catches them in flagrante delicto.

As the titular waiter, Erneste embodies the many themes that swirl around in the novel’s two periods. By making himself vacant to those he serves, we see the effects of loneliness and keeping one’s identity hidden away. At a time where his homosexuality would be harshly condemned, his professional invisibility becomes a sad mirror of his own shattered hopes for sexual liberation. But with the addition of Klinger, the flirtation of class and power compound Erneste’s quiet agony as his lover’s attention shifts upward rather than remaining with his equal.

Sulzer’s prose is calm and meticulous, like his waiter, expertly guiding us back and forward between the two crucial decades. Though the narrator is omniscient, there’s something of the reserve and repression of Ishiguro’s Stevens (The Remains of the Day, 1989). It has plenty of memorable set pieces, such as the Erneste’s voyeuristic approach to Jakob being measured for his uniform or their first sexual encounter. But also more grim moments as queer-bashers exercise vigilantism and one character takes their life. 

With the Mann-like figure of Klinger, and his interest in Jakob’s handsome youth, it’s easy to view him, in reference to Mann’s Death in Venice (1912), as a Tadzio, the object of infatuation for a writer and the unspoken passion of Erneste. At the start of the book, when Jakob’s letter arrives, Sulzer gives us this passage:

“The past was locked away in his abundant recollections of Jakob like something inside a dark closet. The past was precious, but the closet remained unopened.”

That Erneste is unable to leave his past, or be himself is the novel’s core tragedy in a book replete with them. The journey from idealistic and professional twenty-something to middle-aged standard-bearer of lost time and regret is complete. But the perfect waiter handles this by remaining invisible, a shadow passing through life, serving the world unnoticed, and the importance of being Erneste is quietly lost.

As he states in his introduction, the list provided here is “a personal recommendation of often overlooked and unloved novels, short story collections, poetry and non-fiction”, and they come not with concise summaries, but instead explore the value of the books, whether that be for their rarity, the literary history behind them, or purely sentimental reasons. Depending on who you are, some of these books have never been forgotten or maybe they’ve never been known about to forget, but most fall into “the less frequented byways of literature”.

For the most part, these byways are in the literary supernatural, which is not unexpected as Russell, along with his partner, Rosalie Parker, runs Tartarus Press, boutique publisher of such. Here he recalls the first meeting, in print, with Arthur Machen, hoping for existentialism in The Hill of Dreams (1907) and finding something greater. Tartarus would later publish plenty of Machen’s work, and along the way other writers like Robert Aickman (Russell is also his biographer), Denton Welch, and Sarban, the pen name of British diplomat, John William Wall, all of whom are represented.

While each chapter is dedicated to a specific book, they tend to follow the pattern of first discussing the work and its meaning to Russell then honing in on a slice of his life. Thus the book becomes a memoir just as much as it is a healthy helping of suggestions, showing the writer as a renaissance man, where the books he’s loved have led him, in addition to publishing, into writing fiction, translation, and musical composition. This life is intertwined with the books. The author happily talks of old publishers, first editions, author societies and dinners, and befriending other avid collectors and, in the case of Machen, his daughter, Janet.

Personally I’ve only read two of the books here – The Devil in the Flesh (1923) by Raymond Radiguet and The Tenant (1964) by Roland Topor – though I have copies of several more. It’s not a list for completists, as some of these are more than a little out of reach to the casual buyer. But each recommendation is invariably dripping with other titles to explore. There are a few Tartarus books, which may be seen as self-serving, but they clearly mean something to the author and nobody’s getting rich off limited edition hardbacks that sold out years ago.

Though a memoir, there’s practically a subplot running through the book as the character of Noel Brookes, a Brighton bookseller rumoured to be a spy, pops up in Russell’s journey. Other people mentioned, some known from their own artistic endeavours, like Mark Valentine and David Tibet, add pleasing texture. However, the occasional name drop of someone previously unannounced who will, most likely be unknown to those not in Russell’s circle, is at times distracting. 

As the works listed in Fifty Forgotten Books are recounted, it’s clear this is a tribute to the obscure and overlooked. There’s no denying that Russell is the epitome of bibliophilia. He doesn’t just read the works but delights in the world around them, the stories beyond them, the hunt for them in defiance of the internet, and the shared enthusiasm of those other travellers on the lonely byways. One may say that this book is an attempted rescue of such works.

All jokes aside, the Rocky franchise does appear to impress on the characters. Where the first movie had Apollo Creed as victor, here we have the Greek god’s twin, Artemis Victor slugging it out for the win. Boxing cousins share their surname with Clubber Lang. Others come with the sort of main draw name that has gone from lights to legend. Though, while all these eight competitors have made it past regional finals to fight in the nationals, it’s all taking part in a spit-and-sawdust gym in Reno. It’s as unglamorous as boxing gets, with these girls watched, advised, and refereed by men, a mix of low-grade coaches and judges all with shattered dreams as its “a place to be in power”.

In the opening bout, Andi Taylor faces off against Artemis Victor. Where Victor, the youngest of “a Russian doll crescendo of sisters” is intensely focused, so as to be the best among her boxing siblings, Taylor’s mind is drifting, caught up in personal traumas. A boy’s red trunks and the blue rays of a television are like the corners of a boxing ring having their own conflict in her head. But these matches are just as mismatched as the girls slugging it out. At times they feel like conceptual opposites, though all ultimately doomed to mediocrity. In one fight a girl who resists the concept of being a good girl (“All a good boy has to do to be good is put on a clean shirt.”) while her opponent sees herself as just that.

As the girls exchange blows, we jump from one competitor to the other. Sometimes we see them living in the moment, focused on the fight at hand, though other times we are learning about them, their lives and hopes, as they go on to become typecast actors, wedding planners, and pharmacists. Like Muriel Spark with gloves on, Bullwinkel serves up a flurry of past, present and future without ever losing the thread of her narrative. This is because time doesn’t really matter here. The mornings and afternoons dissolve into the eight rounds of two minutes. 

Thanks to mouthguards, there’s very little dialogue beyond grunts, but Bullwinkel delivers characters in other ways, notably by deflating dreams and shattering illusions. Her prose is captivating, confident, and delivered more Sugar Ray than sugary. The style is punchy and at times repetitive, an exciting series of one-twos that’s a sustained barrage of both aggression and commentary. Though each challenge for the girls is the other girl before them, what they’re really navigating is life and societal expectations and learning lessons along the way, notably about picking themselves up from loss, as they move into adulthood.

There is a sense though, that having explored much of the girls’ lives in earlier bouts, there’s less to say in the later stages of the competition. The chapters become shorter, though this at times felt like a relief, to save it stumbling on like a defeated champ. Having lasted the duration, Bullwinkel goes for the knockout with a final chapter that wraps up the book and its whirl of themes. It felt more sucker punch than clean strike, but overall Headshot floats like a butterfly, if not quite stinging like a bee.

When the novel opens, Anna has discharged herself from hospital after a fall (“Whisky was a new habit.”) into the comfort of Nant yr Aur. Her leg is in plaster and her mobility is somewhat hampered. Even though she sees herself as independent (“She didn’t need anybody”) she relies on the assistance of elderly friend, Emyr, who runs errands on her behalf, and his wife, Dora. It would be fair to say that little happens in This House because much of the events have already occurred. This is a quiet novel of processing the past to break out of the present.

Home from hospital Anna is immediately “feeling the house relax around her” but like the plaster cast on her leg, it’s really a restraint, only emotional. Nant yr Aur is a house haunted by its past, a place where grief is contained within its walls. There are offers to buy the house, although selling up is not worth consideration. One potential buyer, a young man called Siôn, seems able to slip under Anna’s usual defences, perhaps because the memories she’s holding on to are projectable onto him.

With a slim cast, each with their own secrets and lives beyond the house, Northey’s story is a relatively straightforward and sensitively drawn affair about breaking out from the routines of grief and grasping what life is left. It’s nicely observed, with time loss, hazy memories, and everyday tasks standing in for purpose. All as one may expect when an idyllic love story slips into a personal nightmare which gets more devastating as long-buried revelations are outed. But the book is not without some optimism. Once Anna walked into this house and chose to stay, but doors can work both ways.

The stories are split across both Campbell’s Liverpool, where psychological horrors abound and Brichester, the city at the heart of his take on Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos. Opening story, Potential, is firmly lodged in 1960s counter-culture, where a young man walks into a hippy gathering, and is befriended by another attendee who suggests another place that may be more to his liking. What begins innocently enough leads to horror of cosmic proportions. That it opens the collection suggests Campbell is flag-planting his territory with this new approach: the Lovecraftian influence remains, but the delivery is going to be different.

So different, in fact, that Campbell finds space among the stories for some meta-fiction, with The Franklyn Paragraphs, an enjoyable romp – and spin on the Lovecraftian mythos – with the author himself on the trail of missing novelist, Errol Undercliffe. The Interloper, a story purportedly by Undercliffe also appears. Lovecraft isn’t the only model as The End of a Summer’s Day, one of the collection’s standouts for me, brings Robert Aickman to mind. A short tale about a newly-wed couple on their honeymoon taking an excursion to a cave. It pulls the rug out from under the couple, with no explanation. Where the ending seems slightly innocuous, it gains from a further reading, where a throwaway line midway suggests a greater tragedy to come.

Such subtlety is part of Campbell’s trademark here; he’s not the type to hold readers’ hands in the dark. His narratives require patient ingestion and invite cross-referencing of details. The spaces between the narratives require their own level of consideration. With each reread they open up without ever fully revealing their hand. Campbell is so in tune with his characters’ psychological states that we are often never even sure if the horrors are real or tricks of the mind. With abrupt time jumps between paragraphs even linear narratives feel disorienting. Add to this particularly off-kilter perceptions, such as a bus “swallowing its queue” or, when a man wanders among trees (“branches wept on him”), and we have a constant sense of unease.

Some stories, despite reading them several times, are sadly baffling; too abstruse as to be fully satisfying. However, Concussion, a lengthy fantasy where an elderly man and a young woman on a bus have a week-long fling in the past is a gem that rewards multiple reads. It’s a sustained fever dream, flitting in and out of reality, memories, and other influences so that we are never truly grounded in what may be going on.

Though there are killers and ghosts, and even a take on garden gnomes in Made in Goatswood, nothing feels conventional. The Enchanted Fruit luxuriates in nature writing as a man takes from an unusual tree with consequences. The Sentinels looks to standing stone lore, and The Stocking is a grounded and nasty tale of office flirting, though its reference in The Franklyn Paragraphs arguably pulls it into Campbell’s wider mythos.

The most unusual thing about Demons by Daylight is how long, for a book less than two hundred pages, it took me to read. I found myself reading the stories over and over, searching for the key detail that would unlock the tale. Campbell’s stories feel dense, thanks to layers of detail and references, mostly literary and cinematic, but they do reward patience, mostly. Yes, the collection feels uneven, but this book is a young writer finding his new style. This year he’ll have been publishing books for sixty years, so it’s clearly served him well.