A Heron Hollers – 19/10/2024

Step into the theatre with me. Not past the looming columns and through the gilded front doors. We are not nodding to the doorman, removing our hats, adjusting our neckties and settling into the stalls. Nor are we climbing into the gods to peer down while holding tightly to the rails.

Look for the street door people pass unseeing. We will risk the maze on the other side of the curtain. Let’s climb down into the depths of the theatre, thrumming with the company who bring together costume, writing, scenery, humour, tragedy and fear.

Skip that step. Sorry. The wood’s a little worn.
Of course we keep donkeys here. How else would we revolve the stage?
No need to jump. That’s just a doll. Looks a lot like the Director though.
That noise? I didn’t hear anything.
Allow me to brush that beetle from your hair.

Welcome to Norwich. Welcome to the Theatre Royal. Welcome to the home of Edith Holler, the girl who can never leave or the theatre will fall.

From her room fronting onto the street, Edith performs dumb shows for the passersby. From the roof, she gazes over the city she cannot visit. In the unused furnace room, she reads every book, every newspaper, every record she can get her pale hands on about her beloved Norwich. And there she finds a story about missing children, a story she must tell, a story that could be performed…

I am quite taken with Edith Holler by Edward Carey, a novel which, like a good play, will affect all of your senses and stay with you long after the final words. Carey’s intricate, fleshy illustrations add to the unsettling experience. And you can even download and make the toy theatre which Edith describes… (Thank you to the person who made my week when they revealed this).

We turn to the macabre, the uncanny, the eldritch… Antidotes on offer too in case you are overly susceptible to a dark tale…

The Hotel by Daisy Johnson is a series of linked stories set in a gothic hotel in The Fens. The Hotel is irresistible. It seems almost alive. Its layout shifts. What can be said of it one day cannot be said the next. But there is a history waiting to be… unearthed.

For more ghostly short stories:
Let A Sleeping Witch Lie by Elizabeth Walter is a haunting collection of gothic Welsh tales. Be careful with that blackberry wine.
The Snow Ghost brings together classic Japanese tales that have been told and retold over the centuries as their ghosts refuse to depart.
The Bodleian library have published a new edition of The Eerie Book, an anthology including Poe, Shelley, de Quincey and more. Good luck in your game of cards with Earl Beardie.

(Un)safely ensconced in gothic buildings and themes as I am, I’ve added The Little Stranger by Sarah Waters to my dark evenings reading pile. The novel is set in Hundreds Hall, a crumbling mansion occupied by the Ayres family, to which Dr Faraday is called to treat a maid suffering a breakdown. The house has always held a fascination for this otherwise rational man…

And then there is the ultimate haunted house story, newly clothbound, The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson. I’ll reveal nothing. (Except my advice to skip the show which claims to be based on it.)

While Shirley Jackson’s stories were peeling back the façade of American suburbia, Celia Dale was doing so here in the UK. A Spring of Love sounds like such a safe title does it not? One you can give to the relation who likes ‘nice books’. Don’t do that.

The antidote to the above, not least to the stares which bore into your soul from the cover of Celia Dale’s novel, is Friends of Dorothy by Sandi Toksvig in which a young couple move into their dream house only to find that they are sharing it with the previous occupant, eighty-year-old Dorothy. That could be the setup for another horror. But I promise that the only nightmares this is likely to cause will be about dealing with conveyancing solicitors on a Friday afternoon.

In These Our Monsters, eight writers have each chosen a place in England, ranging from Berwick Castle down to Tintagel and examined its myths, legends and history. The resulting pieces – I suppose they are fiction though also textual criticism, pairing well with Amy Jeffs’ books – are surprising and original, even those with plots you recognise.

Should you need help identifying the source of any unfortunate goings on in your life, turn to The Malleus Maleficarum, edited by Peter Maxwell-Stuart. The original was a practical guide to detect and prosecute ‘witches’ which led to numerous murders. This edition includes research on the book’s effect in late-medieval Europe and now, when women are still on trial.

Witchcraft by Marion Gibson is a fascinating history of thirteen witch trials, again demonstrating the contemporary relevance of this history for our legal systems and societal norms.

Research into witches combined with personal experience of daring to be a woman older than twenty have formed Helen Ivory’s excellent poetry collection, Constructing a Witch. Watch out: just when a poem has you laughing, that’s when her words are about to strike you. Not with a curse but with a howl and a punch in the gut.

For those wanting a slightly more cuddly approach to spooky season, for themselves and their children:
Night Night, Spooky Friends by Gareth Williams is a tactile board book in which a skeleton assures his friends that the time has come for even monsters to get to bed.
The Pumpkin Who Was Afraid of the Dark by Michelle Robinson follows Boo the nervous pumpkin as she learns to shine.
Old MacPumpkin Had a Farm by Katrina Chapman is an excellent twist on the rhyme. Sorry if you now have that stuck in your head until Halloween.
In Witch Cat by Lucy Rowland, a witch’s cat wonders which kind of cat he could be were he not a witch’s cat…
Ages fives and upwards must read the latest in the Adventuremice series, The Ghostly Galleon by Philip Reeve and Sarah McIntyre. Indeed any age will enjoy the mystery of Captain Cheesebeard. Not to mention the latest Dave Pigeon book by Swapna Haddow, Zombies! in which some monsters seem to be disturbing the (usually peaceful?) lives of pigeons Dave and Skipper.
Middle grade readers will be thrilled by Mallory Vayle and the Curse of Maggoty Skull by Martin Howard. She’s just a necromancer-in-training and he’s just a skull stuck in a treasure chest, asking her to find him a wig. It’s a modern classic.
Chris Mould’s graphic novel edition of The War of the Worlds is a thing of perilous beauty, which will draw in the most reluctant of readers. If your child found too much jeopardy in the quest for Captain Cheesebeard, give them a few years…
Young adults may find useful guidance in Scarlett Dunmore’s How to Survive A Horror Movie. Or maybe they would have been better off not investigating who is killing off their classmates and just getting out of there…
Those who felt rather sorry for the witch in Hansel and Gretel need this new edition of Struwwelpeter by Heinrich Hoffmann, a collection of dark cautionary tales. Those traumatised by even thinking of a gingerbread house should instead peruse Up in the Canopy by James Aldred, a big, gorgeous exploration of the rainforest with no skulls, zombies or witches but plenty of treasure.