Those that know me, know I’m a sucker for anything Halloween related. This is why I was so excited to get my hands on Halloweird: Classic stories from the season of Samhain, edited by Johnny Mains and published by The British Library. To say that it had me at ‘In the flickering candlelight of pitchy Autumn nights, malevolent spirits crowd the gloom and weird, terrible things come to pass’ written on the back cover would be an understatement. Plus the cover is the most beautiful shade of pumpkin (despite my crummy photography) with added gruesome jack o’lanterns inlaid with a silver foil that satisfyingly shimmer when moved around in the light. It’s weighty and well designed both inside and out, the fly pages going full pumpkin again.
Johnny Mains has gathered together a wonderful collection of poems and stories that unsurprisingly focus on Halloween and all that comes with it. It covers around two centuries of literary responses to the season and I think Mains is successful in his ambition to create ‘an anthology with a sense of time, yet have stories that feel timeless when you read them’. The only obvious entry is Rabbie Burns’ classic poem ‘Halloween’, the inclusion of which felt necessary as it gives context to the other pieces. For a lover of ghost stories and the uncanny, the rest is like opening presents on your birthday, each one being an absolute delight to discover complete with author bio if you want to read more from them.
Once I started, I didn’t want to stop and would have read the whole (substantial) book in one go had I not been off to an early Halloween party. There are stories of ghostly women, carriages made of bones, castles, graveyards, spurned lovers, ghouls and other supernatural entities plus your classic fucking around and finding out when it comes to the forces of Halloween. However, given I was all about the ritual year for so long, what I enjoyed the most was how many of the authors incorporated calendar customs and traditions that would have been contemporary for them but are now memory or footnote for us. Rituals such as sowing hempseeds or looking into reflective surfaces or eating specific foods, or in the case of ‘The Sword’ by Rachel Swete Macnamara, actual wish fulfilment in seeing your husband to be. My only argument with the book is that Mains insists that pumpkins are easier to carve than turnips. I maintain that turnips are much less sticky.
A few final thoughts. The first being the best lines in the whole book come from the poem ‘‘Twas the Night of All Hallows’ by Geraldine (emphasis in the original):
She lies there, but lo! most amazing to note,
Encircling her neck was a FROLICSOME GOAT
The second being, in future I will be using the term ‘it was the nuts and ale, and things’ should I need to excuse any personal erratic behaviour as per Miss Florimel in ‘The Face in the Glass’ by Letitia Virginia Douglas.
And finally, I’m not done with this book and will be pushing for at least one dramatic reading on the 31st from myself and my companions, in costume and doing exactly what Mains suggests, reading it by candlelight. It’s not too late to get your copy in time for Halloween and it’s infinitely dippable for the rest of the year, plus it would make an absolutely gorgeous present. You won’t regret it.
Halloweird: Classic stories from the season of Samhain edited by Johnny Mains is published by The British Library and is available at all good bookshops and online.
