Come Sing For The Harrowing: Stories by Dan Coxon

I would like to thank the author and Weird Little Worlds for an advance copy of this collection in exchange for a fair and honest review

Publisher – Weird Little Worlds

Published – 10/10

Price – £11.89 paperback £4.46 Kindle eBook

The newest collection from award-winning writer, Dan Coxon, Come Sing for the Harrowing is a terrifying menagerie of the strange and weird. Unsettling, poignant, and always masterfully crafted, these 16 stories are a feast of folk horror where the fine line between the mundane and the malevolent is blurred beyond repair.

With five never-before-published stories as well as tales featured in publications such as Beyond the Veil and Great British Horror 7, this collection is a tour de force from one of the most talented rising stars in the horror fiction landscape.

Horror can go full on. Scares coming at you from every direction like grand opera. But I quite like it when we get quiet, unsettling and building on that feeling that something is not quite right. Its that feel of the uncanny when we find a road at night deserted, a strange room we have never been in before feeling ominous or a stranger who for unknown reasons is making you nervous. In the excellent collection of short fiction that is Come Sing For The Harrowing: Stories by Dan Coxon, we have a host of dark tales that weave webs of weirdness and horror around the characters and the reader before you realise what is wrong and that it is now too late.

In this collection I enjoyed

Come Sing For the Harrowing – A young teenager named Jack starts work at the local Black Death Experience but feels they’re being watched. There is a delicious sense that things aren’t right from the moment we see Jack being measured for his costume. A feel that Jack is being targeted in some way by a mysterious watcher. What makes the story then really work is fine the extent to which jack is being played with and the finale ends in troubling body horror and betrayals before leaving us to worry what happens after the very last line.

The Wives of Tromisle – Sometimes horror is not monsters coming after you but things we don’t understand. A daughter returns to the island she came from to visit her nearly seventy year old mother; who announces that she is pregnant. This story deals with child deaths and miscarriages but handles the subject sensitively – its about how loss changes people and the extent people could wish to make things better. The sense we have is that some dangerous bargain has been made all across the village as the daughter finds out what is going on and by whom but at the same time there is no feeling of danger just a dangerous temptation that asks a question of the main character as to what she now wants. Open-ended but haunting.

Bring Them All Into the Light – I’ve read this story before and loved it – think of this as a far more evil version of Field of Dreams. A middle aged father finds a cottage in the country to escape the rat race but the hill by it entrances him and he is soon consumed by an all-encompassing desire to build a church on it. It’s a tale of an obsession; a man losing all he has and yet we feel all he now seeks is going to end very badly…which it does but Coxon delivers it beautifully together.

Bumblethatch – a short disturbing tale of a young teenager who gets visited by a teenager everyone believed dead. Barnaby also know as Bumblethatch thanks to his hair seems to want to visit her. Coxon captures the causal cruelty of teenagers to anyone they dislike but then the story is like a dark fairytale of love, bargains and laced with death. It is like a modern folk horror legend beginning and the last paragraph is very well delivered and troubling at the same time.

A Broken Vessel – we move to the USA in the next story and a gang of occasional thieves are led to believe a farmer is sitting on a room of wealth. We meet the gang, the preparation to threaten violence and then the story sweeps into folk horror. There is a stunning scene of our narrator confronted with something evil beyond his comprehension but what makes things really come together is the lone survivor’s experience after this. The price of the event on reality is truly unusual and the sense that things are not yet ending for our narrator makes us fear that more danger waits for him. One of my favourites.

Vile Jelly – This take uses the death of Gloucester in King Lear as inspiration – the man who had his eyes removed (the vile jellies of the tale). But what happened to them? A lowly servant has found a strange man on the forbidden heath who loves a strange trade and this is a prize to seek out. Very little gets explained here but the mysterious Gleeve is a figure who under their hood suggests a very dangerous and powerful man with his own agenda we hope we never learn. A lovely evocative mood piece.

From The Earth – A stunning disturbing tale where we meet Arwen a young girl who seems to be kept prisoner because people believe she speaks to God. We feel immediately for Arwen as she describes a situation she is only just starting to understand, and we learn to hate the adults who seem to think this is the right thing to do. The finale goes in a very unexpected but pleasing situation. Full on folk horror as the world is changed and the reader may say after the way Arwen was treated that this was totally justified. That Coxon made me think that is a sign of a great tale

Bodies on the Dance Floor – An office party night of drugs, alcohol and loud music makes Nathan suddenly cut off from his friends and with Barclay.  A man Nathan thought was dead. This short sharp tale explores Nathan’s friendship with Barclay. A tale of cruelty, peer pressure and poor decisions that makes the reader wonder is this supernatural, chemical or justice at work

Clockwork – A beautiful haunting story where daughter creates an automaton. This tale explores an abusive father, the absence of a childhood and the impact it can have growing up. Coxon explores this carefully and lets our main character find some peace.

The Darkness Below – My favourite take in the collection is a simple idea o a family taking their children to Cheddar Gorge a network of underground caverns. Coxon then takes that fear of parent losing a child and runs with it to create something truly worrying. The father loses his grumpy teenage son and then upon finding him feels that this is no longer the son he knew. A fascinating dark tale where we are seeing things only from the father’s perspective and as we watch the horror unfold we have to wonder. Is this supernatural or madness at work and neither of those explanations will make you feel better about what happens. Powerful and this will stick in your memory.

Long Gone (Slight Return) – a really innovative ghost story arrives here as we meet members of the grunge band Mutt years later talking about how their lead singer disappeared. Coxon ably creates the sense of rock star interviews but seeds throughout trouble. An enigmatic troubled lead singer whose theories are wrapped in the song lyrics we see who started to believe they were in the wrong reality. The seeds of the haunting are sown into the tape recordings we read transcribed. A clever puzzlebox of storytelling that wraps together int the final song very neatly.

In Flickering Light – I love the voice that Coxon creates as it does read as if you’re reading a biography of someone who was involved in the British films of the 1960s and 70s. Our main character talks about a director he worked for regularly, the friendships he and his soon to be wife made with a woman named Barb who had the director’s eye. It all feels very real and of the time then we take a sudden step with the main character at the wrong place and see that barb is under a very unusual influence. A strange scene that makes no sense until we encounter a much-changed Barb years later. The horror of losing a friend as life gets in the way and finding them no longer who they were is here turned into something much nastier and nightmarish. A troubling tale that also reminds us that powerful men seeking women for their own pleasure is actually a real life horror story too.

Gorphwysea - this is a fascinating story of past and present where an old man enters a retirement home with his son, and a travelling man happens upon the same building as a workhouse many years before. We have two very different types of tales alongside each other.  A workhouse that seems to hide a dark secret and a retirement home that seems to have a hidden danger. We know they’re connected but not sure how and the finale creates something very strange linking the two in a very different malignant way without any explanations but a lingering sense of something horrible at work.

Grains of Sand – this tale of an Egyptian mummy working as a security guard is darkly funny, horrible too but may make you smile a little even as nasty things happen. Go on you are intrigued admit it!

London Deep – our narrator tells us of how his brilliant brother who was an engineer disappeared. With an atmospheric of a permanently raining London that seems to be close to flooding this story as well as captures the strange sibling relationship of never quite fully undemanding each other is also combined with some comic horror that works in the settings we meet really well. Its wonderfully ominous– a  prelude to worse things top come and never needs to really explain itself too much. Another favourite.

Beyond The Beach, the Trees – a neat and troubling finale to the collection as a family go on an exotic tropical holiday where the father is never comfortable. He can’t settle, he is not happy,, and we are not too sure if that’s his own fault or other’s. It’s a place where strange things happen and danger seems ever closer. I really lied the weirdness of this and its left us to connect the dots and decide what is happening.

Dan Coxon continues to be one of the best short fiction writers at these kind of stories. This is an incredibly strong collection that will linger in the mind long after reading it and should disturb you long after you finish the final page, in all the right ways! Strongly recommenced and perfect for the spooky season we are in!