CloisterFox - Issue 1

Edited by Verity Holloway

My reading for this weekend consisted of the first issue of Cloisterfox, a new bi-annual zine of speculative fiction ideated and edited by Verity Holloway.  Holloway is a well-known writer in the realm of the weird and this new publication reflects her aesthetic and her penchant for mysterious, unsettling, almost Aickmanesque fiction.  The inaugural issue of Cloisterfox was funded through Indiegogo.  In the pitch, Holloway speaks of her plan to publish, twice yearly, “six captivating, genre-bending short stories in an A5 perfect bound volume, richly illustrated, ideal for throwing in your bag”. This is exactly what the postman delivered last Friday. Even before delving/diving into the stories, I was captivated by the zine’s dark and atmospheric illustrations (courtesy of James Powell of Grey Bear Communications) and the touch and smell of its glossy paper.  Then to the texts. Holloway acts as master of ceremonies. In her introduction, she explains the image of the fox strolling through the cloisters, “a holy fool unconcerned by censorious glances. The fox peeps around doors, laughs at petty human boundaries and scavenges treasure from trash heaps.”  She invokes, as the guiding spirit of the publication, eccentric maverick clergyman and occultist Montague Summers, adopting as the motto of Cloisterfox his epitaph “Tell me strange things...”  

Strangeness is indeed the common denominator of all the featured stories.  The first, Gallows Hope Circular by David Hartley, is a description of an imaginary countryside route of the type fund in myriad “walking guidebooks”.  Starting from the vicinity of the fictional village of Lower Gravelly, it weaves its way through woodlands and meadows, leading to Parson’s Tower, a historical gallows site, and then back, following the passage which the corpses used to take, to the start of the walk... and normality.  This is a highly suggestive piece, where the reassuring sights, smells and sounds of the English countryside are constantly undermined by references to buried collective memories and ancient lore.

These echoes of folk horror also resonate in Darkness Falls by Ally Wilkes.  Her narrator, who suffers from Seasonal Affective Disorder and is also seeking to come to terms with a break-up, seeks solace in an ancient ritual involving an old druid tree which has survived the urban sprawl. Wilkes is fresh from the publication of her Arctic horror novel All the White Spaces. Her story in Cloisterfox shares the same feel of psychological horror, albeit in a very different setting. 

The figure of the lone protagonist battling inner demons recurs in  Chịkọdịlị Emelụmadụ’s Nighttime, which addresses the theme of eating disorders through a simple, yet effective, extended metaphor.

Although nature is often the playground of the mysterious, strangeness can also be found in an urban context.  In Daniel Carpenter’s They Have Gone to the City, two brothers return to Manchester after the death of their mother. A visit to one of their teenage haunts triggers strange memories and sensations, the story’s enigmatic ending suggesting that the story is a symbolic depiction of grief.

Weirdness can come in many forms, but Natasha Kindred’s Second Homes (The Daydream Real Estate Scandal) propels “weird” into a dimension of its own.  Literally. Set in a sort of off-kilter parallel universe, and featuring, amongst other things shady deals in captured dreams and a processed meat fetish club (?!), this story is full of arresting, surreal, disturbing, nightmarish images and is probably quite unlike anything you’ve recently read.

After Kindred’s unclassifiable experience, Robert Shearman’s The Wait almost feels “normal”, even though it involves an unusual day at school, which will mark the narrator for a long time. Possibly forever.  This is a well-crafted tale which starts quite conventionally until it veers off-course, injecting the uncanny into the everyday. 

The fox certainly has strange stories to tell. And I can't wait for it to make its way to the cloister again...