Poor Souls' Light - The Curious Tales Collective

Poor Souls’ Light is the second collection of winter ghost stories from the Curious Tales collective, a group of writers made up of Alison Moore, Jenn Ashworth, Emma-Jane Unsworth, Tom Fletcher and Richard Hirst. The collective, joined this year by Johnny Mains and M John Harrison have produced a series of uncanny short stories inspired by the likes of MR James and Robert Aickman, to whom this collection is a tribute.

The stories in Poor Souls' Light are linked by a strong identification between people and place; many of the tales deal with individuals who are drawn back to significant locations from their childhood. In others, family ghosts remain tied to familiar places, their spirits inextricably linked to their homes. Characters are disconcerted to find that places they remember as welcoming have become forbidding, even hostile with the passage of time, giving the stories an uncanny atmosphere.

This is especially true of Alison Moore’s The Spite House, in which a woman, Claire, returns to her childhood home after the death of her father. In the absence of family members, the house itself seems to have taken on a malevolent air. Moore describes buildings thrown up with cruel intentions, which have somehow internalised the attitudes of their builders:  'skinny, ugly constructions built by people holding grudges, people wanting to spoil the view or block the light or otherwise ruin the life of a hated neighbour, often a sibling'. Moore’s narrator has travelled back from Australia, and jetlag leaves her feeling unmoored from time. In her uneasy state, the building seems permeated by a hangover of sibling rivalry. There is a strange, mouldering smell in the air, making the building feel oppressive, like something she needs to fight.

In Animals, by M John Harrison, a middle-aged woman staying in a holiday-let cottage finds herself preoccupied by imagining the building’s former inhabitants. She begins by trying to infer their characters from the few possessions left there, but gradually becomes drawn further into their world, overhearing snatches of their conversations. Dinner for One, by Jenn Ashworth, also features a haunting, with an intriguing twist, as the reader tries to puzzle out whether the narrator is haunted by the ghost of his wife Maggie, or if he is haunting her: 'she barely eats, has not washed in days and is changing her clothes only rarely... She smells of soil, but then again, so do I'.

A more obviously malevolent take on the supernatural is found in Blossom, by Johnny Mains, featuring a hospice owner who avenges the wrongs which have been inflicted on his patients in their lives. Blossom works well as a self-contained short story, but also tantalises - it could work equally well in a longer form, with the narrative fleshed out. And the Children Followed by Richard Hirst is another well-realised horror story, the only one in this collection to be set in an identifiable past. The narrative focuses on a woman whose twin brother has been sent to fight in World War II. Her village is playing host to a group of evacuees who take on an air of menace, with their vague pasts and sinister gas masks; unsettled by the constant sense of threat, her ability to separate fantasy and reality becomes damaged.

The Exotic Dancer, by Tom Fletcher, features another return. Here, the sense of threat, at first existing only in his protagonist’s mind, eventually becomes hugely, grotesquely real. Finally, Emma-Jane Unsworth’s Smoke is probably the least supernaturally inclined story in the collection, but still manages to create an uneasy atmosphere. Where characters in other stories are drawn to a particular location, the narrator of Smoke seems to be running away from one. The story focuses on a woman who has been burying herself in work (an unspecified research project based in a Cold War bunker in Berlin), but is haunted by a sense of loss. Unsworth’s spare prose creates an immediate feeling of absence (‘the backseat where there’s no baby-seat’) which dogs her character as she travels through Europe with her partner.

With illustrations by Beth Ward, Poor Souls’ Light is a well-crafted collection – there is an element of continuity between the contributions, but each author manages to make their own twist on the theme, so it never feels stale. The authors will be appearing at events across the UK through December and January: details can be found at the Curious Tales website.