SCIENCE FICTION AND FANTASY

DAVID V BARRETT ROUNDS UP THE LATEST TITLES FROM THE WORLD OF SPECULATIVE AND FANTASTIC FICTION

The Cottingley Cuckoo

AJ Elwood

Titan Books 2021

Pb, 365pp, £8.99, ISBN 9781789096859

We have three wonderfully fortean concepts to start with. We all know that fairies, even if they might sometimes be pretty, delicate little winged creatures, are rarely benign, and in AJ Elwood’s The Cottingley Cuckoo we learn (perhaps) just how vindictive they can be. On her first day working at a nursing home Rose meets a somewhat formidable resident, Charlotte Favell, who gives her a letter to read; written to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle in 1921, it tells of the finding of a dead fairy by a river in Cottingley by the writer’s sevenyear-old granddaughter Harriet. Over the coming months Charlotte gives Rose more letters to read: Harriet’s mother, also called Charlotte, is struck blind, and loses all energy or interest in others. Could the fairies have bespelled her in some way? Rose becomes pregnant and meets Charlotte Favell’s pregnant daughter… Harriet. She becomes convinced that the present-day Charlotte and Harriet are the mother and daughter of a century before, or fairy substitutes for them – and when she has her baby she doesn’t take to it, becoming more and more certain that it is a changeling, that Harriet’s fairy child has been swapped for hers. It could all, of course, simply be a disturbing combination of suggestibility and post-natal depression… or could the fairies be real?

Gigantic

Ashley Stokes

Unsung Stories 2021

Pb, 229pp, £9.99, ISBN 9781912658145

In contrast with that dark tale, Ashley Stokes has an at times hilarious take on cryptozoology in Gigantic, with the search for the North Surrey Gigantopithecus. Kevin is a dedicated believer – a Knower – and an Investigator in the GIT, the Gigantopithicus

Intelligence Team, a small group whose new leader is actually a sceptic. Why is there a complete lack of physical evidence for the creature? “It always covers its tracks… That’s why we never find anything.” Kevin’s obsession with proving its existence to the world (because he knows it exists) has already destroyed his marriage; but this only makes him more determined to track it down. And then they get a clear report of a sighting, with mobile phone footage….

The Listeners

Jordan Tannahill 4th Estate 2021

Hb, 288pp, £14.99, ISBN 9780008445393

Have you heard The Hum? Many have, and it’s not always possible to identify its source. In Jordan Tannahill’s The Listeners, mother and teacher Claire suddenly starts hearing it in the middle of the night, and it turns her life upside down. The first night her husband finds her in the middle of the street in her nightdress at 4am trying to pin down where it’s coming from. Over the months, she loses not just sleep but her marriage and her job as The Hum takes over more and more of her life. A few others hear it too, but the small support group she joins becomes identified as a cult. As Claire tells her story, the relentless inevitability of her separation from everyone and everything she knows and loves is heart-rending. The author is clearly familiar with fortean analysis of this and similar phenomena; Claire’s story reads as frighteningly true.

Hollow

B Catling

Coronet 2021

Hb, 254pp, £17.99, ISBN 9781529366433

There’s no artist more weird and wonderful than Hieronymous Bosch, and a novel inspired by his Garden of Earthly Delights ought to be a delight. Some time in the 16th century a group of mercenaries, who vie for unpleasantness (and who die, one by one), are tasked with taking a new Oracle to a monastery; the Oracle is a limbless, unhuman creature kept in a box, fed on the marrow of human bones which the mercenaries take turns in imbuing with their darkest secrets. The monastery sits by Das Kagel, a mountain which may once have been the Tower of Babel; its previous Oracle has died or disappeared, and the aged scholar Fr Benedict believes the abbot is holding dangerous secrets. And in a nearby village Meg, the drunken butcher’s wife, forms an alliance with misshapen creatures – woebegots and filthlings – straight out of Bosch. The novel is inevitably OTT, and really should be amazing – but unfortunately Hollow disappoints; it’s dreadfully over-written, trying far too hard to be clever but failing to entertain.

Marion Lane and the Midnight Murder

TA Willberg

Trapeze 2021

Hb, 320pp, £14.99, ISBN 9780857828460

Refreshingly light and enjoyable, Marion Lane and the Midnight Murder is an innovative first novel by South African writer TA Willberg, set in late-1950s London – or rather, below London. Marion, a young woman living with her overbearing grandmother, is recruited as an apprentice for Miss Brickett’s detective agency, housed in a warren of tunnels under Fulham, west London. She’ll undergo intensive training for three years, learning to use intricate and clever devices, before becoming an Inquirer, solving crimes for the people of London that the police either can’t or won’t. But then a member of staff is murdered within the agency itself; it has to be an inside job – and when evidence emerges pointing incontrovertibly to the killer being her friend and mentor Frank, who had recruited her, she has to clear his name. There are dark passages, especially towards the end, but like the labyrinth it inhabits this novel is full of unexpected twists and turns. A minor criticism: the author doesn’t make enough of her chosen era. 1958 is very different from the present day, but because nearly all the novel is set in the underground tunnels of the detective agency rather than in the streets above, it could be almost any time. But it’s still fun!

Treacle Walker

Alan Garner 4th Estate 2021

Hb, 152pp, £10, ISBN 9780008477790

A new Alan Garner novel is a rare and welcome event – and though Treacle Walker is short, the author sees it as the culmination of all his previous work. The setting is unexplained. Joe Coppock, a boy of unstated age, lives alone in a small house in the country, near a railway line where a steam train he calls Noony passes by at midday. He has a lazy eye, and the doctor has told him to wear an eyepatch over his good eye to increase the strength of the other one. He encounters a strange rag & bone man, Treacle Walker, swapping an old pair of pyjamas and a lamb’s shoulder blade for an almost empty old jar of healing balm, Poor Man’s Friend, and a donkey stone for whitening his doorstep. Treacle is an old term for a healing medicine, and Treacle Walker tells Joe he can heal “all things; save jealousy. Which none can.” Joe encounters a bog man, Thin Amren, and realises (having accidentally smeared a touch of the ointment onto one eyelid) that he sees two different worlds though his two eyes, one mundane, one mythical. The story draws deeply on both folklore and Garner’s own childhood in the 1940s; characters from his (and Joe’s) favourite comic, Knockout, leak threateningly into Joe’s own world. Garner packs more into this brief book than many authors do into much longer works; this is a gem that repays several readings.