#Review - The Twelve Even Stranger Days of Christmas by Syd Moore

Design by Andy Allen.
Against a blue/ back ground,
alternating holly leaves
(in neon green) and skulls
(neon blue) surround
the title.

The Twelve Even Stranger Days of Christmas
Syd Moore
Point Blank, 28 October 2021
Available as: PB, 277pp, e, audio
Source: Advance copy
ISBN(PB): 9781786079794

I'm grateful for an advance copy of The Twelve Even Stranger Days of Christmas to consider for review.

Syd Moore is a favourite author of mine, so it was a a delight to see this collection of short stories following up her The Twelve Strange Days of Christmas which I see was only published two years ago but 2019 seems much more remote to me! This collection of new stories is appearing just in time to be an indulgence for the dark winter nights - if you can't bear to keep it for Christmas, that is.

I should mention a couple of things about the collection. First, while The Twelve Even Stranger Days... does feature some stories set in Adder's Fork, home of the Essex Witch Museum, most aren't. While this may disappoint some, Moore's writing is always to be relished and it's great to see the range she covers here. Secondly, while there is indeed a story for every day of Christmas, many are not explicitly Christmas themed.  Again though, that range is shown off: here you'll find transformed fairy tales, folk horror, an enigmatic glimpse (I think?) of earlier generations of the Strange family, detective stories (including a winter themed story from a pre-Great War Adder's Fork), classic ghost stories, tales of supernatural, and of perfectly natural, revenge - and, yes, the plum in the pudding, Christmas Day at the Essex Witch Museum, updating us on how lockdown has been affecting our friends there.

At the centre are three linked stories, Journey of the Magi: a Triptych. The separate parts of this make excellent use of the Essex topography, locating an eerie story amidst the lonely marshes and remote communities to be found there and documenting Maggie's journey on Christmas Eve to visit friends. We see what happens in a little world which seems a long way from the comforting and the modern. Combining Essex history with a vein of folk horror, Moore operates in the shadows; between what's spelled out and what we guess, between our fears and our hopes. Taking loops into history and with a dark mystery at their heart, this triptych would make excellent reading by the fire on a dark evening.

Another story with a folk horror motif, Rogationtide, could in my mind almost be set in the same community. It's not a Christmas tale - Rogation, the blessing of the community's crops and animals, takes place several weeks after Easter - but has the same preoccupations as the Triptych: the stubbornness of an inward-looking, remote rural community, its capacity to apply a weird logic that resists incomers' attempts at change, and the lurking possibility that picturesque ceremonies and beliefs may suddenly take us somewhere very dark indeed. Moore creates an atmosphere of menace hanging over what are apparently some rather jolly celebration, the unease that goes with the reign of the Lord of Misrule. While not perhaps so explicitly seasonal, this is a very fitting theme for Christmas itself, I think, as is the first story in the book, Pantomime, whose opening sentence turns expectations on their head: 'Nobody ever realised that the Seven Dwarves were female.'  Upturning received hierarchies is of course the essence of pantomime (even if paradoxically it's done according to hallowed conventions) and Moore sets about that with relish, mashing together the conventions concerning the Dwarves and those of the noir in a story narrated by a straight-talking Doc which gives us all the inside secrets of  what really went on in that cottage.

Moore returns to the detective story, but more conventionally, in The Over-Winter Harrowing of Constance Hearst, which opens with the melting of the snow and the discovery of a preserved corpse in the churchyard at Adder's Fork. This is pre First World War, and the story is narrated by the delightfully stolid Inspector George LeGrand who flits about the county in pursuit of a solution, staying now in this, now that, grand house, making use of motor cars and telephones loaned to him and generally having a fine time before finally grasping and exposing the details of a crime as devious as anything encountered by Sherlock Holmes or Hercule Poirot. 

Moore sticks with the detective theme in the much more modern Two Minds, which sees the underrated Inspector Drew Oates, victim of sexist assumptions, come through to the solution when a woman is found dead in a pool of blood.

Another highlight of the collection is Thirteen (a number that is something of a theme in this books as you'll have spotted - what could be more fitting given the witchy background) which takes us far from Essex, to a paradise Mediterranean island whose history has, however, been far less than heavenly. This is a lovely ghost story in the best MR James style - however primed you are for the horror, you won't I think spot it coming: Moore slants reality ever so slightly to give us a satisfying and oh-so chilling vignette of the weird beneath everyday life.

After the Party Comes the Bill is a story it might be best not to say too much about, to avoid spoiling the gentle ramping up of unease that builds up as an unappealing City boy narrator makes his way home from an office party on Christmas Eve. Repellantly un-selfaware, sexist and bullying, he is somebody it is very hard to like and I for one was delighted when he got the runaround from C2C Rail...

Christmas Dates has at its centre a similar figure, a self-styled pick-up artist who's used the loneliness and isolation of lockdown to prey on women. On the last day of 2020, he's determined to get his "score" up to 52 for the year. Again, Moore magnificently portrays this unpleasant, unsympathetic man is what feels like a very of-the-moment story.

The two remaining pieces in the book both intrigue, albeit in very different ways. In String of Lights, young Rozalie recalls her youth before the Great War, and her mother's stories of her youth, in particular her dalliance with a certain Archduke in an ancien regime world of dazzling balls, gowns and uniforms. A world that's gone now, but is there a tantalising possibility that this is a glimpse at the past of Rosie's own family? And in Thirteenth (that was a formatting challenge!) the volume as a whole meets a fitting conclusion in a poem describing the coming of the Four Housewives of the Apocalypse - who are naturally working even harder over the Christmas season than they do the rest of the year.

Overall, a gorgeous collection (and it would be an excellent gift too, I'll just plant that thought).

For more about The Twelve Even Stranger Days of Christmas see, the publisher's website here. 

#Review - Strange Tricks by Syd Moore

Design by Andy Allen

Strange Tricks (Essex Witch Museum Mysteries)
Syd Moore
Oneworld (Point Blank Crime), 3 June 2021
Available as: PB, 384pp, e, audio
Read as: Advance PB copy
ISBN(PB): 9781786075482

I'm grateful to Point Blank for an advance copy of Strange Tricks to consider for review. It was a real treat to receive it because I've developed a fondness for Rosie Strange (and for her creator, Syd Moore).

Rosie is the proprietor of the Essex Witch Museum, having inherited it form her uncle, Septimus. The Museum holds many mysteries, relating both to Essex (and its supernatural, and not-so-supernatural)  history, and to the Strange family itself - a rackety lineage with its own dark secrets.

While she'd like to focus on museum affairs - including those revolving around dreamy head curator (actually, the only curator), Sam, Rosie is frequently called away to investigate supernatural-tinged crime, often at the behest of Monty who works for MI-something-or -other.

Over four novels and several short stories, Moore has established an appealing setting in the Museum and, in Rosie and Sam, a couple whose will-they, won't-they adventures - a frequent question which is generally usurped by episodes of mortal peril -  keeps the reader guessing and anticipating. 

In Strange Tricks, Rosie faces a particularly dark investigation when she and Sam are asked to check out a medium. Sam (usually the Mulder to Rosie's Scully) is surprisingly hostile to Pearl, and it turns out that her information may be hitting a little close to home for him, making enquiries particularly fraught and driving a wedge between him and Rosie. But what they're learning suggests there may be a group of victims unknown to - or disregarded by - conventional law enforcement, and that lives may be in danger. Rosie and Sam have to cooperate to get to the bottom of this, which - even with the grim background - brought me as a reader unalloyed joy: they're never as much fun as when bickering. 

At the same time, Rosie is following up new discoveries about her dead mother, working her way through a journal which has come to light. There's a narrative about a mysterious stranger, something at odds with what Rosie previously believed but which seems to me to echo developments in Rosie's own life. Illustrated by specially drawn Tarot cards, these episodes from Celeste's 80s heyday sustain Rosie in difficult and dark moments - of which Strange Tricks has many.

The story comes to a genuinely spooky (and scary) climax, one that tests Rosie endurance to its limits. I wasn't surprised in the end at the strength she shows here - if you took her interior monologue at face value you might think her a bit superficial and likely to fold at the first broken nail, but readers of this series will already know that Rosie has hidden depths (perhaps even largely hidden from herself) and she finds extra (and unlikely) resources to draw on here. 

Strange Tricks also shows how Moore is able in these books to pivot from the comic to the creepy, all while highlighting truly relevant themes highlighting the plight of people who fall through the gaps in society (the always relevant original Essex "witches" themselves, the trafficked women featured in Strange Sight, or the victims here). It also points to wider developments in the story of Rosie's family - and a potential threat to her happy hopes of some attention from Sam. 

Moore is on excellent form with Strange Tricks, keeping this series humming along and clearly building to future developments on several fronts. I can't wait for more. 

Finally - look at that cover! I loved the previous covers, but this neon themed design, suggesting sleazy alleys and danger (and the importance of those Tarot cards) is I think really attractive and will certainly make the books stand out. 

For more information, see the publisher's website here.

Review - The Twelve Strange days of Christmas by Syd Moore

The Twelve Strange Days of Christmas
Syd Moore
Point Blank, 10 October 2019
PB, e, 199pp

I'm grateful to the publisher for a free copy of The Twelve Strange Days of Christmas to consider for review.

These are short stories which take place in the world of Moore's Essex Witches novels - supernatural thrillers focussed on Rosie Strange and her family museum in the village of Adder's Fork, Essex. The Strange family and its history entwine with that of the Museum which is itself a slightly uncanny place.

The stories fit with the wider series in a number of ways, variously taking place in Adder's Fork, featuring minor characters from the books or members's of Rosie's family (including Septimus himself), narrated to familiar figures or, in a couple of cases, I think anticipating future books. A couple are not, perhaps, strictly ghost stories but they slot in very nicely with the general theme which is of course death is a common - death anticipated, death mourned, death overcome - death awaited.

The collection does feature some stories which were in The Strange Casebook published last year but there are as many new ones, and the older stories stand up very well to rereading. If you've read and enjoyed the Essex Witch Museum books you'll have the chance to spot how the stories fit in to that world.

Septimus and the Shaman sees Septimus Strange recounting a wartime episode that took place while he was on active service. As well as shedding light on just what he got up to at that time (and perhaps his wider connections with the Establishment) it also contains a warning and some hints about Rosie's future.

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

The House on Savage Lane, and Jocelyn's Story are stories of a slightly different kind, 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 first, not the second) so I won't say much about them. I think they look forward to potential future Witch Museum mysteries. I especially found Jocelyn's Story to be genuinely strange and unsettling. The House on Savage Lane was a bit more conventional but still had a couple of effective twists.

Easily Made is a kind of sequel to Snow, introducing a different kind of horror.

In the Bag is a classic ghost story, with a humorous twist on death and revenge. 

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

She Saw Three Ships is a delight, a whole story featuring Ethel-Rose and taking place in that most ghost haunted and 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 happens, obviously. This slice of folk horror is calculated to raise a shiver.

Madness in A Coruña is 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. 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.

Christmas Eve at the Witch Museum is a real joy, a little slice of life at the Museum. It's all much as you'd expect, with Rosie hanging up the mistletoe and thinking thoughts of Sam, some gruesome exhibits on display and a surprise appearance by a very English phantom.

Barefoot Through the Snow is  a delicious, sad, classic ghost story fitting well into the Witch Museum mythology - the stories of innocent women tormented and put to death - as a mother seeks out her children across the cold, cold fields. It suggests some unfinished business that perhaps Rosie will be able to sort out one day?

A Christmas Carole is, as the name suggests, Moore's version of a time hallowed classic, one without which no collection of Christmas ghost stories would be complete. It's familiar, but she also gives it a distinct twist and make sit her own.

These are great stories. They will mean most to those who are familiar with the Witch Museum series, but the collection as a whole may be read as an entertaining and chilling group for Christmas. While some have appeared before that was in an e-only version and you'll want a print copy of this to live on your shelves next to the other Strange books, won't you?

For more about the book see the publisher's website here.

Review - Strange Tombs by Syd Moore

Strange Tombs (Essex Witch Museum Mysteries, 4)
Syd Moore
Point Blank (Oneworld), 2 May 2019
PB, 378pp

I'm grateful to the publisher for a free advance copy of Strange Tombs.

Syd Moore's Essex Witch mysteries go meta in this fourth instalment, with Rosie Strange and Sam Stone called in when a body is discovered on Hallowe'ent at a mystery writers' workshop being held in a lonely mansion out in the Essex countryside.

(If you haven't read any Essex Witch Museum Mysteries before then here is a brief, spoiler-free summary: Rosie Strange is a Benefit Fraud inspector who unexpectedly inherited the Essex Witch Museum from her Uncle Septimus. Initially meaning to shut down and sell the place, instead she falls under its spell and is soon working alongside the fascinating Sam Stone, curator of the Museum, to investigate crimes and strange goings-on which have a possible supernatural bent. And discovering more about her family along the way...)

With plenty of scope in Strange Tombs for bickering between authorial egos, resentments over publication (or not) and the general suggestiveness of the setting, Moore could have been forgiven for going full Agatha Christie or even Cluedo (there are some knowing hints in that direction). In fact she doesn't do that. As with the previous books in this series, Strange Tombs is focussed on Sam and Rosie, whose evolving and well observed relationship is now firmly established and a joy to watch develop further. While so far the books have only taken up a single summer of fictional time, a great deal has changed.  The two know and trust each other much better, but there's a still a lot which isn't said, still a lot of avoiding certain areas and topics and even new mysteries concerning (this time) Sam's background. And with the cycle now moving into winter, Rosie is feeling a sense of darkness, a blunting of her insight, that may - I think - be due to more than seasonal affective disorder.

Ordered to look into the mystery surrounding Ratchette Hall by Sam's Intelligence contact Monty (Rosie insists on referring to him as Agent Walker which suggests a whole layer of X-Files like skullduggery) Rosie and Sam have a kind of semi-legitimate interest in a death (that may, anyway, not be a murder) which means their particular lines of enquiry are, at least, tolerated by the assembled writers and the villagers of Damebury. And there seems plenty for them to uncover, what with strange noises in the woods, rumours of witchcraft, pagan temples, mutilated animals, and a desecrated tomb. It's obviously time for the classic Essex Witch Museum blend of an open mind and a steely scepticism - so why is Sam suddenly convinced that he's seen a ghost? And what does happen to Rosie in the woods?

This is a rattling good story that operates at a number of levels: the immediate mystery, its rather odd background in local lore, and an ongoing thread surrounding Rosie in particular, who seems to have inherited more from her family background than a decaying museum. While the events of Strange Fascination told her a lot about that background, there's clearly further stuff to discover here with Moore ratcheting up the tension and, in some particularly eerie passages, deftly replacing the characteristic humour of these books with a genuinely creepy tone (not the first time she's done that, of course - but here it especially made the back of my neck prickle...)

In this fourth book (with some short stories as well) the series shows no sign of flagging, indeed with the season of walking ghosts and the looming darkness of Winter it appears to be heading for new revelations and a chillier tone. Still great fun, and with some sharp messages besides (Rosie is an Essex girl, and feels the prejudice this entails: "Being a blondish blandish chick from Essex with more than a bit of natural bounce in the chest area and a nice rounded accent too, that kind of attitude came at me form snooty people all over the place...") I'd strongly recommend.

For more about Strange Tombs, see the publisher's website here. You can buy the book from your local bookshop, including via Hive, from Blackwell's, Waterstones or Amazon.

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.

Review - Strange Fascination by Syd Moore

Design by James Jones

Strange Fascination (Essex Witch Museum Mysteries)
Syd Moore
Point Blank, 3 May 2018
PB, 448pp

I'm grateful to the publisher for an advance e-copy via NetGalley.

I'm also honoured that Syd Moore picked up on an earlier comment of mine which has influenced a particular scene in this book. For the record, Syd, I think the scene in question works VERY well...

This is the third of Moore's Essex Witch Museum mysteries. The earlier books took us on a chase around England (Strange Magic) and to London (Strange Sight) as Rosie and Sam were brought in to investigate different mysteries but now we're firmly back on home ground, with nearly all this story taking place in Adder's Fork (hence the nickname for the locals, the Forkers) where Rosie Strange has her eponymous museum, inherited from her grandfather, Septimus.

I'd been wanting to hear more about Adder's Fork and about Rosie's family and this book doesn't disappoint. Adder's Fork turns out to be a lovely English village - complete with gruesome legends and (allegedly) a buried witch - and trouble kicks off almost straightway with a proposed housing development that would destroy a local landmark, the stone known as the Blackly Be. Like an episode of Midsomer Murders, we get local rivalries, protestors, sexual undercurrents and nasty deaths - and that's even before the supernatural seems to breaking loose.

And before we begin to learn about the history of Rosie's family.

Of course in the end all these things are intertwined, and in this book - at last! - Moore finally clears up some of the mysteries she's been hinting at so far in this series. It's a tangled story and I won't drop any spoilers, but it is worth saying that - as you might have guessed - Rosie's background is a lot more interesting than you'd expect from a holidaying Benefits Fraud investigator from Leytonstone.

As ever much of the charm of the book is carried by the will they/ won't relationship between Sam and Rosie which - given Rosie's rather endearing mixture of perceptiveness and clanging inability to see what's right in front of her - has its inevitable ups and downs. Rosie continues to stand up for herself ("What proper grown-up girl couldn't handle a torch wielding mob, right?",  " 'You, Strange are from a long line of witches and sluts and' she spat... 'and, and, and feminists!' ... I spent most of the joinery back contemplating... how Araminta had... made quite an insightful comment.")

I have to say she has grown on me through these stories, beginning as pretty unsympathetic - a Benefit Fraud inspector, wanting to sell off the museum, obviously reluctant to be involved in all the spookiness that had swept her up - but fighting her way though magnificently, never more so than in Strange Fascination. Rather fittingly, there's a lot more spookiness here than in the earlier books (although, as ever, Moore is careful to leave open-ended what exactly is happening) yet Rosie and Sam come through with aplomb, navigating the gallery of villagers, toffs, Essex girls and distant relatives as well as the police, forensic service and even a greasy estate agent.

All in all I think this book - and the series its part of - an absolute triumph, with its own distinct voice, humour and - at the centre - a rather sweetly romantic story.

The last word should go to Rosie. Asked whether "Some secrets are better left buried" she replies "No... I think it's better to face the strange, however painful... that might be."

And that is what this book does.

For more about the book, see here.