Review - The Strange Casebook by Syd Moore

The Strange Casebook
Syd Moore
Point Blank, 31 October 2018
e-book only

I'm grateful to the publisher for an advance copy of The Strange Casebook via NetGalley.

These are short stories which mostly, though not all, take place in the world of Moore's Essex Witches novels - supernatural thrillers focussed on Rosie Strange and her family's museum in the village of Adder's Fork, Essex.

If you've read and enjoyed those books you'll have the chance to spot how the stories fit in to that world - either featuring moonier characters, member of Rosie's family, forming testimony given to the Museum or just appearing in Adder's Fork itself.

Death is a common theme here.

Death Becomes Her focuses on a policewoman we have seen before, and perhaps explains a bit about her.

Snowy is a gentle hymn to death and loss and perhaps - perhaps - to consolations beyond.

Madness in A Coruña is probably the longest story in the book, and is an effective and creepy ghost story, perhaps with an MR Jamesian bent. An unwary traveller to the Spanish city (yes, the same as in the poem by Charles Wolfe) discovers mysteries there. The city seems to be guarded against something. But is it guarded well enough? As this story came to a climax I found myself sitting forward and gripping my Kindle so tense did it get.

She Saw Three Ships is a delight, a whole story featuring Ethel-Rose and taking place in that most ghost haunted, uncanny of English counties, Cornwall. What happens when the locals make you unwelcome on the eve of a creepy local festival? Well, you dig in and see what peahens, obviously. This slice of folk hour is calculated to raise a shiver as Hallowe'en approaches.

Jocelyn's Story and The House on Savage Lane, are a different kind of story, the sort where the revelation of what is really going on is what drives the horror (even if you'd begun to guess as I did for the second, not the first) so I won't say much about them. I did, though, find Jocelyn's Story (which looks ahead to Strange Tombs, the next Essex Witch Museum book) to be genuinely strange and unsettling, a different sort of horror. The House on Savage Lane was a bit more conventional but still had a couple of effective twists.

So, great stories - whether read while you wait impatiently while you wait for Strange Tombs, or if you just want something a bit creepy for the lengthening evenings.