Dark Play by Tim Cooke
I would like to thank the author and Salo Press for an advance copy of this collection in exchange for a fair and honest review
Publisher - Salo Press
Published - Out Now
Price - £6.99 paperback
Dark Play is a collection of short stories about a father and daughter living in an isolated farmhouse on the side of a mountain. The daughter has developed an intense form of imaginative play that seems to connect her to the surrounding landscape, a place with a history of hardship and violence, where the past leaks into the present.
Tim Cooke’s stories bleed originality. They are eye-opening, distinctive and often absurd, and they continue to surprise and delight. - Lucie McKnight Hardy
Tim Cooke writes exemplary and thrilling modern weird. His stories of things half-glimpsed, of bad memories painfully resurfacing, leave an indelible and disturbing mark. - Gary Budden
Children are as we all know scary. Human but not quite saying or doing what we expect as they don’t know yet the rules of the games we call life. Being a parent is scary (so I’m told) being responsible for another human with a mind of their own; a world filled with danger, weirdness and anxiety. In Tim Cooke’s deliciously unsettling short story collection Dark Harvest is a set of tales of a father and his daughter in a remote farmhouse where innocent games often turn incredibly dark.
The format of the stories is both simple and plays to the heart of the fears I’m talking about. Each story is told by our narrator ‘Dad’ and focuses on him and his daughter Nia. What that allows for is we as readers have someone to sympathise with - the adult and a child to care about getting in danger. A simple trip to pub and hearing about the Welsh landscape’s darker folk tales as in the opening tale ‘The Judgment’ awakens something in Nia; she claims she went to a secret room in the pub and met sinister ladies and then later at night perhaps the farm is about to be visited. The way the games become more scary and Nia seems less herself is delivered subtly but scarily
A simple father daughter bonding in ‘The Visitor’ starts in an apple orchard and gets more worrying when Dad talks of a witch who visits unwary people to cause trouble and then the doorbell goes. With imagery of a witch; diseased apples and a Dad here who appears reckless we wonder how this visitor at the door will be greeted. Not quite what I expected and more troubling in the process!
Just when we get used to the format things start to alter with ‘The Conversion’ adding in Dad’s sister and her own baby daughter. Seeds are planets that previous stories also glossed over - where is the mother. A weird mural Ona church wall sets out a very creepy evening where other forces get into play with a truly disturbing final scene.
Each tale resets Dad and Nia but we as readers start to look for signs of something else is at work. Why is Dad drinking so much; where is the mother and Cooke knows when to play with the format even in a short collection. ‘Foxgloves’ is just mildly unnerving while ‘Repetitions’ is cunningly making you look in one likely direction for danger and something weird and then snaps you to look at the picture again.
The final tale ‘Mother’ appears to change the format as finally we meet the mother and a simple childhood prank turns into that most scary of moments a lost child. Cooke drives up the tension in this story and a sinister set of images ultimately become a harbinger for doom.
A really impressive short collection of tales that know just where to enter the knife of shock between your ribs. We all know what being a child is like and we have all heard hope parenting is not easy but here supernatural and weirder elements make this dynamic all the more unsettling. Well worth your time!
