Review - Oaths and Offerings ed by Nathaniel Spain

Oaths and Offerings 

Edited by Nathaniel Spain
Carnyx Press, 4 June 2026
Available as: PB, 127pp 

Source: Advance cop
ISBN(PB): 9781919453200

I'm grateful to Carnyx for sending me a an advance e-copy of Oaths and Offerings to consider for review.

Oaths and Offerings is the launch anthology from new press Carnyx who are devoted to the writers and stories of Northern England - a noble venture. It’s an impressive and handsome volume printed on good quality paper and with stories to match! Described as “an anthology of folklore”, this collection showcases eight new stories, all with their roots in folklore but reflecting the various forms in which it occurs. So there are stories with a contemporary setting (Away with the Fairies, Charcoal Nils), those which are more straight folktale-inflected (Awd Goggle, The  Monster of no Seeming) and there is even the Jamesian (Cups and Rings). 

We see the difficulty faced by a newcomer from abroad settling in a rural community, the problems of redeveloping an old mining site, the troubles of a shepherd girl and the dangers of obliterating tradition - as well as the mutability of tradition! They're all extremely good examples of their forms, reflecting the diversity and breadth of Northern England and taken together, this is a very strong collection which should I think set Carnyx off to a cracking start.

The first story, Awd Goggle by Steven French, tells a tale handed down from the narrator's grandma about how, as  a girl, she saw industrialisation meet its match when an ancient, revered tree is torn down. The indirect narration introduces a sense of timelessness in the events (while hanging on to the essentials) a sense heightened by its being in Yorkshire dialect.

Of Mineral, of Bone by Emma J Lannie draws on the rich mining heritage of the North. Whether in the copper mines of Alderley Edge, the salt mines of Cheshire or the coalfields, mining has always been a superstitious trade. A dangerous business, it sought to know and placate whatever spirits or beings dwelt in the depths, able to cause catastrophe and take lives. We see such rituals in this story. But what happens when the miners leave and the mines are abandoned? There is a legacy - mineral-laden waters that can pose a hazard. A solution seems to have been found here, but Lannie leaves the reader uneasy that there may be aspects that engineers and builders haven't considered. A truly creepy, menacing story.

Modern Britain has a truly diverse range of food traditions, much of it derived from abroad and unfortunately subject to the same tedious culture wars as other aspects of life (periodic social media arguments erupt over the proper statues of chicken tikka masala, for example). In Away With the Fairies by Mae Tang, we see an incomer, Zhenyi, pushing back against her ignorant neighbour and seeking to respect local lore and tradition in new and bold ways. This one really made me smile and I think while short, is a microcosm of a larger truth, showing how tradition is not fixed but is the brilliant result of human effort and bargaining with real, active powers. 

Mother of God by Sophie Parkes makes a similar point, contrasting the busloads of tourists coming to see the quaint folk customs in a village with the hard lives of the residents. A couple of girls, left on their own by parents out at work, add their own spin to the packaged tradition on display for the visitors. This is the only story (I think) without a dash of  overt supernatural (though possibly I'm wrong about that).

Charcoal Nils by Emma Sprakarn is very much a folk tale, though a modern one. Set in Scandinavia this is the one of only two stories that doesn't take place in Northern England, though the atmosphere - the cold, the mountains - is one with the rest of the book, as is the sense of being a little at the margins. And also the theme of the ancient in the modern, in a story of revenge and the failure of the modern world with its invented rules to take account of what is real.

Cups and Rings by Victoria Stewart, set in Scotland, looks at those enigmatic Pictish markings mainly found on upland stones (presumably because these are less likely to have been disturbed). Nobody knows what they mean, what they were for or the particulars of who made them but here we see two different attempts at interpretation set, perhaps, a hundred years apart. And we see what becomes of the investigators. I called this one "Jamesian" above, and it has that sense of obliqueness, of time folding away - and also, perhaps, a message that sometimes it's better to leave well alone.

The Monster of No Seeming by Sophie Reck Pointon is perhaps, of the stories here, the most obviously a folk tale, taking a young girl, Isla, set to guard the sheep, on a quest to rescue her sister Netta. In the best spirit of folklore, impossible tasks have to be carried out and the quest results in learning and growth. Punctuated by occasional remarks and exchanges from the narrator, The Monster sets up both a distance from its subject (this all seems to have happened long, long ago) and a closeness (the two settings are perhaps very intertwined).

good-dark-night (Suzannah Evans Furnass) is set in a community of the future, finding its own rituals to control a harsh environment. In a world of global heating and environmental catastrophe, that means yearning for and seeking to bring back the good, dark nights.

So, this set of stories interrogate the nature of tradition - how it can be changed, and when it’s best respected; its relationship to landscape and the use of the landscape; the place of people - individuals families, the long-settled and the newcomer, in that landscaper; and much more besides.

An impressive start to the Carnyx list, and I’ll be eager to see what comes next. 

For more information about Oaths and Offerings, see the publisher's website here.

#Review - The Red Hollow by Natalie Marlow

The Red Hollow

Natalie Marlow
Baskerville, 28 March 2024 
Available as: HB, 307pp, audio, e   
Source: Advance copy
ISBN(HB): 9781399801843

I'm grateful to the publisher for sending me a copy of The Red Hollow  to consider for review.

William (Billy) Garrett and Phyll (Hall) are back, six months after the events of Needless Alley, for another investigation in the 1930s Midlands. In this story, though, Marlow moves away from the noir-ish atmosphere of the earlier books, with its dark, smoky cityscape and its themes of political and economic corruption, and gives us something more like a classic 30s murder mystery in which a group of people are stranded in a remote country house. The sense of place is equally strong. But so is the sense of cloying evil - reminding me of Sherlock Holmes's comment that the vilest crimes take place in the countryside.

The story opens with a call for help. Phyll's brother, Freddy, is being cared for in a private asylum in the village of Red Hollow "out in the county" (though within a short driving distance). The fees for this have swallowed up the family money, explaining why she's been so desperate for cash and now its proprietor, Dr Moon, asks her and William to investigate strange disturbances and a death that have taken place. The unspoken deal is this will cover some of the fees.

So Phyll and William venture out into the woods, and soon find themselves out of their depth, The surviving patients - including Freddy - put the strange events down to the legendary man-hating "mermaid" which is said to haunt the local lake. This creature recurs, in folkloric allusions, a carving in the local church, and as part of the family backstory of Lady Pike, who owns the Hall but has been forced to let it out. her family has, it seems, many eminently hateable men in its lineage.

A phantom mermaid can't, however, have been killing and mutilating patients, even if the weather has taken a preternatural turn for the torrential, stranding Phyll overnight. Fretting alone in Birmingham, he calls on his old gangster friend Queenie for help. Then the fun really begins...

This is an exceptionally creepy, tense novel, mainly focussed on the events of a single night during which William, Phyll, Queen and Moon, joined by a ragtag collection of patients and the fearsome dowager Lady Pike, sustain themselves variously by copious amounts of drugs, drink and tobacco. There are gruesome deaths (the local vicar is bludgeoned in the first few moments). There are disturbing visions. And there is a tangled plot bringing together the unspoken secret of Red Hollow Hall, modern gang violence and of course the shadow of the War. 

As to the latter, this book is soaked in the backwash of the Trenches - most of the male characters played some part and it shapes their hopes and fears, their responses to, especially, the kind of stress they find themselves under here. This is very much an asylum where the patients are in charge - indeed Moon himself struck me as a man who could easily be on either side of the padded door, as it were. So, be assured, the switch to something that at first sight looks like a cosy Golden Age mystery doesn't mean that Marlow is going soft on us, indeed the opposite is true. Nor, in the end, are we free of political or at least social commentary with two very different historical trends - the stifling hand of the aristocracy, and the dark stirrings of organised crime - surfacing. (Or perhaps, not so very different trends, isn't aristocracy just gangsterism which has forgotten its roots?)

Plot strands wrap together - the delusions of the patients, that relentless fear of something evil in the dark, the decline of the Pike family in the face of coal mines and clay pits eating up their land and dissolute fathers and sons eating up the estate, Queenie's uneasy sway over the Birmingham underworld, and more.

It makes for a messy, compromising, affair, one that nobody comes away from with clean hands, but which is a fascinating, nail biting read and one I'd strongly recommend.

For more information about The Red Hollow, see the publisher's website here.