My Year in Books 2022: January

I'm a bit late posting this... not a great start to my year of posts! Sorry about that!

Once again, I'm going to be writing monthly blog posts with short reviews of all the books I've read for fun, rather than for research or review (not that those books aren't often fun, of course). Hopefully, the rest of the year's posts will be published on time! But for now, here are the three books I read this January:

The Haunting Season (2021)

The first book I read this year was sort of a reread, but not quite. I skim-read The Haunting Season back in November, as part of the prep for my Hannah’s Bookshelf Christmas Special. (I know… I probably shouldn’t give away my secrets like that!) I knew that it was the sort of book I’d enjoy reading slowly, so I put it on my to-read pile for a proper read over Christmas. I ran out of time in December, but since we’re celebrating the seasons more thoroughly this year, it seemed like it might be the right book to pick up between Christmas and Imbolc. And I was right – this collection was perfect for the dark winter nights of the post-Christmas period. The anthology contains eight short stories, all set in winter, and all about haunting (though not necessarily ghosts). Although these are all new stories, they’re mostly set in the past. In some stories, this past setting is quite specific, but in others there’s just an eerie sense of an older, other time. All eight stories were beautifully written and very readable, and I’d struggle to say that I have a favourite. ‘A Study in Black and White’ by Bridget Collins had me hooked from the start, and ‘Thwaite’s Tenant’ by Imogen Hermes Gowar had a powerful sense of place and setting. I also liked the very visceral folk horror of Andrew Michael Hurley’s story ‘The Hanging of the Greens’. Perfect winter reading, and a strong recommendation from me!

The Hoarder by Jess Kidd (2018)

Something funny happened with this one… I knew I was planning to read Starve Acre later in the month, and I’d just read one of Hurley’s short stories in The Haunting Season, so I thought it’d be best to break the two books up with something completely different. I’d picked up The Hoarder, because I’d seen it on a list of must-read Gothic books and I liked the look of the blurb. It was only as I started to read it that I realized the author’s name seemed familiar. Ah… that would be because Jess Kidd also had a story (‘Lily Wilt’) in The Haunting Season! I guess this month has a bit of a theme after all! In some ways, The Hoarder is quite different to ‘Lily Wilt’, but in others there are some definite similarities between the two stories. The Hoarder is set in the present day, when careworker Maud Drennan is assigned to the home of Cathal Flood, the hoarder of the title. She discovers a towering pile of rubbish (and a towering old man guarding it), but also some hints of a decades-old mystery that she becomes determined to solve. I was hooked from the start by this one. The characters are quirky, but still very sympathetic, and the way the mystery unfolds is really engaging. I did guess one of the reveals, but I really liked the way the story plays with the ambiguity of memories and the stories we tell ourselves about our lives.

Starve Acre by Andrew Michael Hurley (2019)

Since I always read festive books for Christmas and Halloween, it wanted to choose a seasonal book for Imbolc this year. I struggled a bit to find a book set at the end of winter, as most ‘winter fiction’ tends to be set in the run-up to Christmas or around the solstice. Fortunately, Starve Acre is set at just the right time of year. I’ve also read a bit of Hurley’s fiction already, so I knew I’d be getting a folk horror-inflected take on the season. I also knew a little bit about the publishing history of Starve Acre, an earlier version of which was published as part of Dead Ink Book’s Eden Book Society project, but then withdrawn when the novel-length version of the book was contracted. I read four of the other Eden Book Society stories a couple of years ago, but I was a bit late to get the earlier version of Starve Acre. Time, then, to read the longer version. Starve Acre is the story of Richard and Juliette who have moved to his old family home, a place with an acre of land that was once home to a mighty oak tree but where nothing now grows. Richard and Juliette’s son Ewan died before the story begins, and the novel is an exploration of their grief, of landscape, and of the dark tendrils of history. Starve Acre is sad, but in an unsettlingly detached way and with moments of real horror. Perfect for the season.