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McMinn and Cheese @[email protected] · 2026-08-26 · 06:31 UTC

The Mammoth Book of Folk Horror – edited by Stephen Jones

My daughter foisted this collection upon me—it not being my usual thing. I don’t tend to watch or read horror, not because it affects me emotionally, but because it doesn’t. Very few things give me the proper chills, and that’s what I’d expect from this genre. Maybe I’m wrong, maybe I shouldn’t be expecting that, but that’s how I feel.

I will begin by emphasising that I enjoyed these stories. I thought it was a strong collection of weird tales—not all successful, but that’s the nature of short fiction. It’s a hefty tome: 500 trade paperback pages. And it contains weird writing from many different writers, some of whom even I had heard of. More on that below. But I also have to point out that out of 19 stories here, just four (4) were written by women. I’m ready to stand corrected on that (a guess based on names and a quick google), but that is disappointing for a book published in 2021.

So we’ll bear that criticism in mind as we go forward to other criticisms.

What is folk horror? The thing about this book is that, before I read it, I had a vague idea in my head as to what I thought folk horror was. By the time I’d finished it, however, I had begun to doubt whether the sub-genre even exists. Turning to Wikipedia (and the Folk Horror page is active and frequently edited), it offers the following definition:

Folk horror is a subgenre of horror film and horror fiction that uses elements of folklore to invoke fear and foreboding. Typical elements include a rural setting, isolation, and themes of superstition, folk religion, paganism, sacrifice and the dark aspects of nature.

Now, you will note that this definition (which is fairly close to what was in my mind before I started reading this book) relies on other definitions. In particular, what do we mean by folklore? Wikipedia again (and, again, an actively edited page):

Folklore is the body of expressive culture shared by a particular group of people, culture or subculture.[1] This includes oral traditions such as tales, legends, proverbs, poems, and jokes.[2][3] This also includes material culture, such as traditional building styles common to the group. Folklore also encompasses customary lore, taking actions for folk beliefs, including folk religion, and the forms and rituals of celebrations such as festivals, weddings, folk dances, and initiation rites.[2]

Festivals, dances, rites, legends, local tales, beliefs, superstitions.

That’s what you’d expect, right? And then, on top of that, some kind of horror element. Which leads us to a third layer of definition:

Horror is a genre of speculative fiction that is intended to disturb, frighten, or scare an audience. Horror is often divided into the sub-genres of psychological horror and supernatural horror. Literary historian J. A. Cuddon, in 1984, defined the horror story as “a piece of fiction in prose of variable length … which shocks, or even frightens the reader, or perhaps induces a feeling of repulsion or loathing”.[1]Horror intends to create an eerie and frightening atmosphere for the reader. The threats present in horror fiction often reflect broader cultural anxieties

Disturb, frighten, or scare. Shock, frighten, or induce a feeling of repulsion. An eerie and frightening atmosphere. Threat. Anxiety.

I’ll take you back to my opening paragraph. The reason I don’t tend to watch or read horror is that I so rarely react in that way that it seems like a waste of time. I mean, take away the emotional response, and what is horror? Round and round in circles.

In his famous 1919 essay, Freud argued that the uncanny is “that class of things which leads us back to what is known and familiar”. Uncanny is an old Scottish word which has been used to translate Freud’s Unheimliche, which literally means “unhomely”. Freud argued that feelings of unease and fear result when the familiar is rendered unfamiliar—or when we are reminded of an earlier psychic stage, or an earlier stage of human development.

When I used to teach this concept, I used horror tropes as examples, and leaned heavily on Freud’s concept of the “homely” and “unhomely”. There are two ways of seeing the home in horror. To the insider, your home is your safe place, your familiar place, the location you ken or know best. It’s where you run to to get away from the scary thing, when the threat is coming from outside. But then, horror texts will twist the trope so that the call is coming from inside the house, and so on. But there are also homes and houses in horror which are, to the outsider, the unfamiliar and scary thing. A traveller breaks down in the woods and approaches a lone house for help. A group of people knock on the door of a house in Texas, seeking help. To those outside the house, the strange building is the site of the unfamiliar and unhomely. The haunted house, the abandoned manor in the woods.

Think of The Haunting: a group of strangers gather in an old house with a reputation. But the opposite scenario also works: a stranger knocks at your door.

What you might expect, then, in an anthology of folk horror, are stories in which an outsider encounters the unfamilar; or in which the unfamiliar comes calling. This latter is perfectly illustrated by Ramsey Campbell’s “The Fourth Call”, which is a story about a weird family who enact an odd Christmas tradition known only to themselves, and which freaks the rest of the village out. So, sure, we have tradition and ritual tied to a group of people, and you might indeed decide that “The Fourth Call” is folk horror.

But also, given that it exactly fits Freud’s 1919 definition of the Uncanny, just horror.

And that’s my issue here. Tell me this is The Mammoth Book of Horror, and it would have made no difference to me. It didn’t feel, as I was reading, that there was anything particular about these stories. And for the most part, even the horror element was absent, so it felt more like reading fantasy. Above, I used the term Weird Fiction, and that for me is a better fit. Here are stories of the weird and strange, a Mammoth Book of Weird Fiction, but only very rarely is there a horror element. The final entry, for example, “The Gypsies in the Wood” by Kim Newman: it’s a piece of Victoriana loosely based on something from Conan Doyle. There are supernatural elements, characters encountering the weird, but nothing that struck me as particularly horrific.

You might argue that I’m missing the point, or failing as a reader. There are kidnappings, there is a horrible gory death, there are people fighting their way out of the earth, there are uncanny changelings. But the thing is, not only am I unaffected by all this, but so, it seems to me, are the protagonists. The experience of fear and disturbance is not transmitted to the reader.

The only story where this happens, I think, is the first one in the collection: “The White People” by Arthur Machen, because it is written in a stream-of-consciousness style that leaves you on the edge of understanding something that is forever out of reach. It follows Freud’s formula closely, inasmuch as it features a “realistic frame story” that then takes us into the realm of the weird. And it’s the vague, just-beyond-reach, sense that there is something there that is transmitted to the reader.

So for me, it’s hardly horror, and it’s hardly folk, but it certainly qualifies as weird. It’s genre fiction, with the genre left vague. It severely lacks women contributors, but it’s an entertaining collection nevertheless. Some of the stories are too short, the endings too abrupt to have impact, but others are intriguing and even eerie. Definitely worth a look if you like this sort of thing.

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