East Anglian Horror for #RIPXXI: Sara Bayat and Natasha Pulley
My first Readers Imbibing Peril post featured three short story collections. I have more spooky reads to catch up on tomorrow, but today I’m featuring two 2026 works of East Anglian horror with fetching purple and black covers that I read during October. (This might seem like a niche subgenre, but I can actually think of several other books I’ve read that fit into the same tradition; if not all set in Norfolk/Suffolk, they still evoke fenland settings: The Woman in Black by Susan Hill, The Hotel by Daisy Johnson, and Wakenhyrst by Michelle Paver.) Both: 
Hesket: A Norfolk Haunting by Sara Bayat
I bought this after I saw Bayat speak at Marlborough Literature Festival last month. Eight linked chapters, bookended by a prologue and epilogue, colour in a picture of a Norfolk village plagued by strange events when a housing development disturbs the ground. Each character has a source of isolation: Isla and her husband have drifted apart since their daughter died; Nell lives in a retirement home and has lost her dearest friend; Emir doesn’t fit in with the other allotment gardeners due to his ethnic background – even though he was raised in England; and Arthur has extreme social anxiety and an unhealthy attachment to a woman old enough to be his mother.
Bayat is careful to share out the sympathy, including to a tree surgeon involved in cutting down the woods for the construction project and the well-meaning vicar who sometimes oversteps her duties and at the same time fails her family. Loss links her characters, from the participants at the séance local journalist Rio reports on to Finn and his single dad. The discovery of bones and the appearance of a ghost are reminders of medieval atrocities. Nine women were executed as witches here, and the injustice lingers. Alice Spry was drowned in the River Wensum, her body never recovered. She lives on in the name of Spry Woods – and perhaps another form.
My shipping notice featured what must be a previous title, “In Old Hesket Woods,” which feels more appropriate to the subdued folktale vibe. This novel shows promise and I’ll certainly follow Bayat’s career, but something about it was a little too … quiet? provincial? to stick with me. Certain chapters, particularly the first, are strong stand-alones, but some of the rest are thin. Those with ties to Norwich may be keenest to read this. (New purchase – Awesomebooks.com with voucher)
The Salt King by Natasha Pulley
Jesuit priest Avelyn Brocken is recalled from the Vatican to Hreodwater in East Anglia to investigate miracles said to have taken place at the salt mine. His hometown is like its own country, with an ancient language and customs. Legends of the Salt King and the “salt light” emanating from the mine characterise it as a benevolent place, as several recent healings would seem to support. Miracles have been reported at other salt mines from Jordan to Russia, too. But then a Hreodwater visitor is turned into a pillar of salt. As researchers at the Dead Sea have also found, proximity to the salt destroys all electronic devices and potentially threatens human health in a way similar to radiation.
Pulley’s eighth novel blurs the lines between good and evil when it comes to ‘gods,’ ‘witches’ and ‘angels’. Supernatural events might be the physical incarnation of belief or the punishments of a capricious deity. There is quite complicated world-building around Hreodwater, which I’m not used to because I don’t read, for example, hard SF. The inclusion of other salt mine locations, even when they’re not developed into full side plots, might serve as further evidence of what’s going on but also dilutes the central story. Overall, then, the novel felt much longer than it needed to be at over 450 pages.
This was my first experience with Pulley, and I found her style to be similar to T. Kingfisher’s – hip, shrewd fantasy-meets-horror in which sarcasm and queerness (a flirtation between Avelyn and the abbey caretaker, Jericho) reign – but Pulley is less grating. There’s a jokey faux-academic tone to the footnotes, and I loved the sense of humour:
“Avelyn broke. ‘Ssh yourself. What kind of sociopath eats a peach during Mass anyway?’”
“Fabian, I mean this in the most brotherly possible way, but f*ck off before I shove you in the f*cking fen.”
“Where do I find new jeans in Hreodwater? … what would you put on the delivery instructions? Proceed past imaginary castle, mind the angry knights, try not to turn to salt for no reason”
While Pulley doesn’t always gets it right about belief – she admits in the Acknowledgements that she isn’t religious at all so had to interview a lot of people to try to understand faith – it’s heartening that she makes the attempt, and the clash of organised religion and folk religion here, as realised in the troubled character of Avelyn, is intriguing. I’d try another of this author’s (shorter) works; any recommendations for me? (Public library)
My most striking bit of Halloween-relevant reading this year came from an unexpected place: the chapter “Spirits and Demons” in the memoir Ordinary Light by Tracy K. Smith. Her very religious mother was wary about her children celebrating Halloween, though she was happy to provide autumnal snacks and games for her daughter’s kindergarten classroom. When it came to trick-or-treating, though, she subverted the holiday’s tropes by dressing Tracy in a ghost costume disconcertingly reminiscent of a KKK outfit – a reminder that the true horrors are out there in the real world.
Are you doing anything for Halloween? Read anything spooky lately?
#ReadIndies Review Catch-Up: Chevillard, Hopkins & Bateman, McGrath, Richardson
Quick thoughts on some more review catch-up books, most of them from 2025. It’s a miscellaneous selection today: absurdist flash fiction by a prolific French author, a self-help graphic novel about surviving heartbreak, a blend of bird photography and poetry, and a debut poetry collection about life and death as encountered by a parish priest.
Museum Visits by Éric Chevillard (2024)
[Trans. from French by David Levin Becker]
I’d not heard of Chevillard, even though he’s published 22 novels and then some. This appealed to me because it’s a collection of micro-essays and short stories, many of them witty etymological or historical riffs. “The Guide,” a tongue-in-cheek tour of places where things may have happened, reminded me of Julian Barnes: “So, right here is where Henri IV ran a hand through his beard, here’s where a raindrop landed on Dante’s forehead, this is where Buster Keaton bit into a pancake” and so on. It’s a clever way of questioning what history has commemorated and whether it matters. Some pieces elaborate on a particular object – Hegel’s cap, a chair, stones, a mass attendance certificate. A concertgoer makes too much of the fact that they were born in the same year as the featured harpsichordist. “Autofiction” had me snorting with laughter, though it’s such a simple conceit. All Chevillard had to do in this authorial rundown of a coming of age was replace “write” with “ejaculate.” This leads to such ridiculous statements as “It was around this time that I began to want to publicly share what I was ejaculating” and “I ejaculate in all the major papers.” There are some great pieces about animals. Others outstayed their welcome, however, such as “Faldoni.” Most feel like intellectual experiments, which isn’t what you want all the time but is interesting to try for a change, so you might read one or two mini-narratives between other things.
With thanks to the University of Yale Press for the free copy for review.
What to Do When You Get Dumped: A Guide to Unbreaking Your Heart by Suzy Hopkins; illus. Hallie Bateman (2025)
Discovered through Molly Wizenberg’s excellent author interview (she did a series on her Substack, “I’ve Got a Feeling”) with illustrator Hallie Bateman. It’s a mother–daughter collaboration – their second, after What to Do When I’m Gone, a funny advice guide that’s been likened to Roz Chast’s work (I’ve gotta get that one!). Hopkins’s husband of 30 years left her for an ex-girlfriend. (Ironic yet true: the girlfriend was a marriage counselor.) Composed while deep in grief, this is a frank look at the flood of emotions that accompany a breakup and gives wry but heartfelt suggestions for what might help: journaling, telling someone what happened, cleaning, making really easy to-do lists. Hopkins interviewed six others who had been dumped to get some extra perspective. Bateman describes her mother’s writing process: she made notes and stuck them in a shoebox with a hole in the lid, then went on a retreat to combine it all into a draft. At this point Bateman started illustrating. It was complicated for her, of course, because the dumper is her dad. She notes in the interview that she couldn’t just say “He’s an asshole” and dismiss him. But she could still position herself as a girlfriend to her mother, listening and commiserating. The vignettes are structured as a countdown starting with day 1,582 – it took over four years for Hopkins to come to terms with her loss and embrace a new life. This is a cute and gentle book that I wish had been around for my mom; it’s a heck of a lot cheaper than therapy.
With thanks to Bloomsbury for the free e-copy for review.
The Beauty of Vultures by Wendy McGrath; photos by Danny Miles (2025)
I enjoyed McGrath’s Santa Rosa trilogy and was keen to try her poetry, so I’m pleased that Marcie’s review pointed me here. McGrath came to collaborate with Miles, a musician, after her son told her of Miles’s newfound love of bird photography. She writes in her introduction that she wanted to go “beyond a simple call-and-response,” to instead use the photos as “portals” into art, history, memory, mythology, wordplay. The form varies to suit the topic: “sonnet, pantoum, acrostic, ghazal, concrete poem, … even a mini-play.” (I didn’t identify all of these on a first read, to be honest.) One poem imitates a matchbox cover and another is printed sideways. Most of the images are black-and-white close-ups, with a handful in colour. There are a few mammals as well as birds. One notable flash of colour is the recipient of the first poem, the sassy rebuttal “A Message from the Peahen to the Peacock.” The hen tells him to quit with the fancy displays and get real: “I’ve seen that gaudy display too often.”
Other poems describe birds, address them directly, or take on their perspectives. Birds are a reassuring presence (cf. Ted Hughes on swifts): “I counted on our robins to return every spring” as a balm, the anxious speaker reports in “Air raid siren.” A nest of gape-mouthed baby swallows in an outhouse is the prize at the end of a long countryside walk. With its alliteration and repetition, “The Goldfinch Charm” feels like an incantation. Birds model grace (or at least the appearance of grace):
Assume a buoyancy, lightness, as though you were about to fly.
That yellow rubber duck is my surreal mythology.
Head above water. Stay calm. Paddle like crazy.
They link the natural world and the human in these gorgeous poems that interact with the images in ways that both lead and illuminate.
A female swan is a pen and eyes open
I try to write this dream:
a moment stolen or given.
Published by NeWest Press. With thanks to the author for the free e-copy for review.
Dirt Rich by Graeme Richardson (2026)
Dirt poor? Nah. Miners, gravediggers and archaeologists will tell you that dirt is precious. It’s where lots of our food and minerals come from; it’s what we’ll return to – our bodies as well as the material traces of what we loved and cared for. Richardson, the poetry critic for the Sunday Times, comes from Nottinghamshire mining country and has worked as a chaplain and parish priest. He writes of church interiors and cemeteries, funerals and crumbling faith. There’s a harsh reminder of life’s unpredictability in the juxtaposition of “For the Album,” about the photographic evidence of a wedding day; and, beginning on the facing page, “After the Death of a Child.” It opens with “A Pastoral Heckle”: “The dead live on in memory? Not true. / They lodge there dead, and yours not theirs the hell.” Richardson now lives in Germany, so there are continental scenes as well as ecclesial English ones. The elegiac tone of standouts such as “Last of the Coalmine Choirboys” (with its words drawn from scripture and hymns) is tempered by the chaotic joy of multiple poems about parenthood in the final section. Throughout, the imagery and language glisten. I loved the slant rhyme, assonance and sibilance in “Rewilding the Churchyard”: “Cedars and self-seeders link / with the storm-forked sycamore.” I highly recommend this debut collection.
With thanks to Carcanet Press for the advanced e-copy for review.
Which of these do you fancy reading?
R.I.P. Reads, Part I: Apostolides, Dahl, Harkness, Kingfisher & Kohda
Ghosts, witches, vampires, creepy underground things: It can only be Readers Imbibing Peril time of year! Here’s my first five reviews.
The Homecoming by Zoë Apostolides (2025)
This debut novel dropped through my door as a total surprise: not only was it unsolicited, but I’d not heard about it. In this modern take on the traditional haunted house story, Ellen is a ghostwriter sent from London to Elver House, Northumberland, to work on the memoirs of its octogenarian owner, Catherine Carey. Ellen will stay in the remote manor house for a week and record 20 hours of audio interviews – enough to flesh out an autobiography. Miss Carey isn’t a forthcoming subject, but Ellen manages to learn that her father drowned in the nearby brook and that all Miss Carey did afterwards was meant to please her grieving mother and the strictures of the time. But as strange happenings in the house interfere with her task, Ellen begins to doubt she’ll come away with usable material. I was reminded of The Woman in Black, The Thirteenth Tale, and especially Wakenhyrst what with the local eel legends. The subplot about Ellen drifting apart from her best friend, a new mother, felt unnecessary, though I suppose was intended to bolster the main theme of women’s roles. There’s a twist that more seasoned readers of Gothic fiction and ghost stories might see coming. While I found this very readable and perfectly capably written, I didn’t get a sense of where the author hopes to fit in the literary market; she’s previously published a true crime narrative. Full disclosure: I once collaborated with Zoë on a Stylist assignment. 
With thanks to Salt Publishing for the proof copy for review.
The Witches by Roald Dahl (1983)
I’m sure I read all of Dahl’s major works when I was a child, though I had no specific memory of this one. After his parents’ death in a car accident, a boy lives in his family home in England with his Norwegian grandmother. She tells him stories from Norway and schools him in how to recognize and avoid witches. They wear wigs and special shoes to hide their baldness and square feet, and with their wide nostrils they sniff out children to turn them into hated creatures like slugs. When Grandmamma falls ill with pneumonia, she and the boy travel to a Bournemouth hotel for her recovery only to stumble upon a convention of witches under the guise of the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children. The Grand High Witch (Anjelica Huston, if you know the movie) has a new concoction that will transform children into mice at enough of a delay to occur the following morning at school. It’s up to the boy and his grandmother to save the day. I really enjoyed this caper, which I interpreted as being – like Tove Jansson’s The Summer Book – about imagination and making the most of one’s time with grandparents. But in the back of my mind was Jen Campbell’s objection to the stereotypical equating of disfigurement with villainy. The Grand High Witch also speaks with a heavy German accent. It would be understandable to dismiss this as dated and clichéd, but I still found it worthwhile. It also fit into my project to read books from my birth year. (Free from a neighbour) 
The Black Bird Oracle by Deborah Harkness (2024)
Somehow I’ve read this entire series even though none of the subsequent books lived up to A Discovery of Witches. What I loved about that first novel was how the author drew on her knowledge of the history of science to create a believable backdrop for a story of witches, vampires and other supernatural beings that took place largely in Oxford and its medieval libraries. Each sequel has elaborated further adventures for Diana Bishop, a witch; her vampire husband, Matthew de Clermont; and their family members and other hangers-on. Their twins, especially Becca, have inherited some of Diana’s power. I read the first half of this last year and finally skimmed to the end last week, so I haven’t retained much. Diana is summoned to the ancestral seat of the Bishops in Massachusetts and finds herself part of a community of gossipy, catty witches. (Dahl was right, they’re everywhere!) She has some fun, folksy interactions but things soon get more serious as she girds herself for a showdown with the darker implications of her gift. Overall, this didn’t add much to the ongoing narrative and the love scenes veered too close to romantasy for my liking. (Public library)
What Stalks the Deep by T. Kingfisher [Ursula Vernon] (2025)
The third in the “Sworn Soldier” series, after What Moves the Dead and What Feasts at Night. Alex Easton is a witty, gender-nonconforming narrator, which is why I persist with these novellas even though I’m underwhelmed by the plots. Denton, the American doctor friend from the first book, begs Easton to come to West Virginia: his cousin Oscar has gone missing in a mine after sending a series of alarming letters about a red light he saw in the depths. Easton and their right-hand man, Angus, soon encounter claustrophobia-inducing cave systems, various kinds of bad air and siphonophore-like marine creatures that can assemble to imitate other beings. (Why aren’t these on the cover, huh?!) In other intriguing matters, Denton seems to have something going on with his friend John Ingold, an Indigenous scientist. Though, as Easton frequently reminds themself, that’s none of our business. There are some great set-pieces and funny, if anachronistic, asides (on learning how to flick a lighter just right: “I used to practice it for hours as a teenager, in hopes of impressing girls. Look, girls were more easily impressed in those days. Shut up.”) But my feeling with all three books is that they’re over before they’ve barely begun, and they never deliver the expected horror. Smart-ass, queer fantasy/horror: these will be some people’s perfect books, just not mine. If you’re intrigued, do at least try the first one, which riffs on Poe. (Read via Edelweiss) 
Woman, Eating by Claire Kohda (2022)
A very different sort of vampire novel. Twenty-three-year-old Lydia is half Japanese and half Malaysian; half human and half vampire. She’s trying to follow in her late father’s footsteps as an artist through an internship at a Battersea gallery, which comes with studio space where she’ll sleep to save money. But she can only drink blood like her mother, who turned her when she was a baby. Mostly she subsists on pig blood – which she can order dried if she can’t buy it fresh from a butcher – though, in one disturbing sequence, she brings home a duck carcass. When she falls for Ben, one of her studio-mates, she imagines what it would be like to be fully human: to make art together, to explore Asian cuisine, to bond over losing their mothers (his is dying of cancer; hers is in a care home with violence-tinged dementia). But Ben is already seeing someone, the internship is predictably dull, and a first attempt at consuming regular food goes badly wrong. There are a lot of promising threads in this debut. It’s fascinating how Lydia can intuit a creature’s whole life story by drinking their blood. She becomes obsessed with the Baba Yaga folk tale (and also mentions Malay vampire legends) and there’s a neat little bit of #MeToo revenge. But overall, it’s half-baked. Really, it’s just a disaster-woman book in disguise. The way Lydia’s identity determines her attitudes towards food and sex feels like a symbol of body dysmorphia. I’ll look out to see if Kohda does something more distinctive in future. (Secondhand – Awesomebooks.com) 
More coming up on Halloween (thankfully, including books I liked better on average)!
Bookish Beck = Rebecca Foster. American transplant to England. Freelance proofreader and book reviewer.
