The Witching Hour
Ghostly Tales for the Darkest Nights
The Witching Hour is the third – and latest – anthology of supernatural fiction in a series that began with The Haunting Season and continued with The Winter Spirits. Published in mid-October, in the run-up to Halloween, the series makes the most of the lengthening shadows and darkening nights of autumn and winter, evoking the tradition of telling ghost stories during the “spooky season” between October and Christmas.
This volume follows the same format as its predecessors. Indeed, it features the same twelve authors who contributed to The Winter Spirits, with the sole exception of Stacey Halls replacing Laura Purcell. The Witching Hour, however, may well be the best collection so far. The stories build a subtly unnerving atmosphere reminiscent of traditional ghostly fiction, delivering the frisson of the unexplained, the frightening, and the otherworldly. The pages of the book include ghostly visitations, seances gone wrong, haunted houses, Faustian pacts and magic spells. While sometimes disturbing, the stories rarely venture into the more physical, gory territory of much contemporary horror. This traditional approach is also underlined by the settings chosen by the authors – mostly historical and ranging from eighteenth-century France (Susan Stokes-Chapman’s A Midnight Visitor) and Massachusetts (Two Go Together by Imogen Hermes Gowar) to a miner’s settlement in the Arctic between the two world wars (Michelle Paver’s Dr Thrale’s Notebook).
Unlike The Winter Spirits, this anthology seems less concerned with a (darkly) festive theme, although some of the stories do have a Christmas setting or association. In this regard, I particularly liked Natasha Pulley’s The Signal Bells, with its folkloric echoes and its riff on the “Wild Hunt” legend. Another favourite is Elizabeth Macneal’s The Doll’s House, which in certain respects reminded me of M. R. James’s The Mezzotint. I should also mention Stuart Turton’s An Age of Evil: it may not be the strongest story in the collection, but it stands out because it is told through a mixture of smartphone messages, newspaper reports, and police statements, and because it is the only story that is, at least in part, set in the contemporary world.
All in all, the stories in this collection are similar enough to work well together, while providing sufficient contrast in approach to form a satisfying whole. The authors are all accomplished storytellers and, although readers will inevitably have their favourites, all the tales are of a high quality.
This is the full list of stories:
The Doll’s House by Elizabeth Macneal
The Second Witness by Laura Shepherd-Robinson
23, Bridge Street by Stacey Halls
The Bugle and the Drum by Andrew Michael Hurley
Two Go Together by Imogen Hermes Gowar
The Signal Bells by Natasha Pulley
A Midnight Visitor by Susan Stokes-Chapman
An Artful Curse by Jess Kid
An Age of Evil by Stuart Turton
Feast by Kiran Millwood Hargrave
The Terror by Night by Bridget Collins
Macaw by Catriona Ward
Dr Thale’s Notebook by Michelle Paver
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