2026/002: The Witching Hour — various authors

No snow in forty years, no true winter, no true Christmas, just the water and the mildew; it was whatever you called the reverse of a miracle. [loc. 2134: 'The Signal Bells', by Natasha Pulley]

From the creators of The Haunting Season and The Winter Spirits, this is another collection of ghost / horror stories with a wintry theme and a historical setting. I read one a day over the Christmas / New Year period, which gave me time to reflect on each: definitely a better way to appreciate the individual stories than reading them back to back.

There are Arctic explorers, ghost-hunters, witches, schoolgirls, ageing academics and an excellent shepherd: there are also unexpected visitors, mad scientists and necromancers. A couple of the stories didn't especially hook me, but others are lurking in my subconscious and continuing to haunt.

The three I enjoyed most were Natasha Pulley's 'The Signal Bells' (unsurprisingly, as I greatly admire her work); Catriona Ward's 'Macaw' (ditto) and Imogen Hermes Gowar's 'Two Go Together'. I also liked Michelle Paver's 'Dr Thrale's Notebook', though the setting (Arctic) and characters (unemotional scientist confronted with horrors) reminded me perhaps too much of her novels.

One aspect I did like was that not all the stories were horror: many featured ghosts of one sort or another, but not always malevolent ghosts, and some examined familiar tropes through new lenses.

‘We shouldn’t really say dead any more. It doesn’t mean anything now, does it? There’s only life. More life. A different form of life. We endure. We can be brought back. Isn’t that marvellous?’ [loc. 1504]

2026/001: The River Has Roots — Amal el-Mohtar

Something, you might think, happened here, long, long ago; something, you might think, is on the cusp of happening again. But that is the nature of grammar—it is always tense, like an instrument, aching for release, longing to transform present into past into future, is into was into will. [p. 4]

A short novella from the co-author of This is How You Lose the Time War. The River Liss runs from Faerie, past the Refrain (an assemblage of standing stones) and through the Modal Lands, between two ancient trees known as the Professors, and between ordinary fields to the town of Thistleford. The Hawthorn family have tended the magical willows along the riverbank for centuries, singing to the trees. Sisters Esther and Ysabel Hawthorn are very close: Esther is being courted by unlikeable Samuel Pollard, but prefers her fey love Rin. They (distinctly non-binary) require an equitable exchange between themself and Esther.

The River Has Roots is rooted (hah) in ballads -- Tam Lin, The Two Sisters, The Riddle Song -- though it reframes 'The Two Sisters' as a story of loyalty, rather than hatred, between Esther and Ysabel. And while Ysabel loves murder ballads, Esther prefers riddle-songs, which she composes for Rin. I was also reminded of Hope Mirrlees' Lud-in-the-Mist, for the ambience: steeped in English folklore and rich with imagery, metaphor and wordplay. And a frightful pun -- a riddle! -- involving rings and swans which made me grin like the Cheshire Cat.