Come Sing for the Harrowing by Dan Coxon – Book Review

Come Sing for the Harrowing by Dan Coxon – Book Review

Come Sing for the Harrowing by Dan Coxon – Book Review

In the blurb of Dan Coxon’s latest collection there reads the following phrase: “feast of folk horror”. This is not inaccurate. The author’s penchant for the macabre is as keen as it ever has been. It benefits the worlds of folk horror which he traverses. True, the folk horror scene has been lodged in the British horror hive mind since the filmic triumvirate of THE WICKER MAN (1973), THE BLOOD ON SATAN’S CLAW (1971), WITCHFINDER GENERAL (1968).

However, it’s in the last decade or so when it’s really skyrocketed. This collection buys into that reaction far more tenderly and poignantly than a lot of modern features. Where many members of the current folk horror gang see only Pagan rituals, Thomas Hardy-esque countrysides, and many a flirtation with village savagery, Coxon goes further – he sees the strands which bind and fuel these elements on a molecular level and he knits them into something altogether different in its sinisterness.

But the reason I mention this theme is because it’s in fact not the overriding one –

what links these stories even further is that Coxon speaks from the heart. And not just his own. Whether he’s tackling creatures who influence memory in ‘A Broken Vessel’, the alienating and otherworldly art of church-building in ‘Bring Them All Into the Light’, or perhaps asking how green these valleys really are in ‘From the Earth’, what remains is his voice; always strong and always enlightened, the voice behind every story is one that possesses a sense of naivety, knowing their rights and wrongs and weirdnesses, but never recognising them until it’s too late. Has anyone ever checked if Dan Coxon and John Ajvide Lindqvist are just pen names for the same person?

Of the darker tales, the two that stood out were ‘The Wives of Tromisle’ – where a septuagenarian woman is made pregnant by the only man on the island, whose offspring are unusual and alien – and ‘The Darkness Below’ – where a father’s obsessive belief his child has been replaced by something cruel and mocking and soulless. Well-crafted and beautiful, both explore the idea of loss but in very different directions, finding the intangible and nevertheless asking you to grasp at it even though you’ll only find fog slipping through your fingers.

However, it is really in the weird fiction stories where the standouts truly stake their claim.

The first of which is ‘Vile Jelly’. After you realise the title is not a reference to a 1980 TALES OF THE UNEXPECTED episode, and rather is taken from a line in ‘King Lear’ when the Earl of Gloucester’s eyes are removed, there’s a splendidly furious and miserable time to be had. In the middle of a thematic blitzkrieg between optography and other spiritual pseudo-science, Coxon’s tale pursues the after-life of Gloucester’s eyes. Events soon centre around an unearthly transaction with a man called Gleeve, whose depravity is both parlous and ethereal. Of all the stories in the collection, it feels the most ripe for visual dramatisation, a proclivity for moody aesthetics on full force. You can certainly see Jon Finch or Sean Bean wanting to get their hands on some of the dialogue. 

Underneath, there’s a lot of guesswork the reader is asked to attempt – a jigsaw while the pieces are slowly melting, if you like – but the trappings feel as indebted to Polanski’s MACBETH as they do the play ‘King Lear’; no matter how peculiar, transient, or dangerous, accompanying every image is a swarm of grit and roughness that knows how to get between your teeth and keep you all too acutely aware of something terrifying and hard-to-swallow. Better yet, you don’t need to be an English scholar or Judi Dench to get to grips with this tale – it’s a grim, unguessable terror for all incumbents!

‘Clockwork’ is the next standout story, taking its cue from folk horror but quickly developing into a patricidal plot.

Even those who have a good relationship with their father will find themselves drawn into the web of negative emotions and encouraged to hate their own family, as the story’s protagonist, the abusive father’s daughter, finds herself able to cathart only via a clockwork automaton. Despite the title and a central premise of the story, it never approaches the late-Middle Age Frenchness you expect of clockwork, where beautiful mechanisms are birthed rather than made – rather it nosedives towards the brutal, oily, saw-toothed coarseness that clockwork truly is. 

Over the course of the story, we see more and more how the daughter comes to process her father’s abusive behaviour via the automaton, around which Coxon’s prose is ever-raw. No matter how much care it’s implied is taken over the machine, the message is a brutal one, and you can practically feel the faulty grating of every cog or painful easing of every spring as keenly as you might feel your own joints pop. Subtle in how abrasive it actually is, you only realise what this story’s doing once it’s knocked you down, and for that alone it deserves your attention.

‘Grains of Sand’ is the third true standout of the collection, its madness flirting with Joe Lansdale’s ‘Bubba Ho-Tep’ in the same breath that it flirts with Chandler Morrison’s ‘Dead Inside’.

Coxon is never one to shy away from black humour.

A fact this story readily admits. As a security guard tries to pursue love, he also believes himself to be the mummy Tep and his unreciprocated love interest in fact Hrere, not a customer at Tesco called Daisy. Things go as chaotically as you might predict, with everything from scarab beetles to wormy regional managers throwing their hats into the Ancient Egyptian fighting ring. Ultimately however, it’s again the authorial voice that sells the author’s machinations: bitter and brutal, longing and full of ennui. And while this is perfect in short story form, you can’t help but want Tep to have his own novel spin-off, catching criminals and constantly being jilted by love, with maybe a sidekick who resembles Arnold Vosloo. A suggestion for you there, Dan. Maybe – please…

‘Come Sing for the Harrowing’ is then a collection brimming with enjoyable sadness. Its execution is very candid, its guillotine blade polished after every slash, and the emotions are forever the number one priority. Even when events dip into worlds of disappearing rock stars told via audio tapes, there’s a human heart at the centre of the story. Tropical paradises that are about as un-MAMMA MIA as can be also share this human element. The question remaining is just how rotted that heart is. Don’t be fooled into thinking that folk horror is the overriding theme influencing your emotions within these stories. You aren’t singing for the harrowing because they’re collecting twigs for a Druidic wicker statue. You’re singing for them because they’re…well… harrowing!

Come Sing for the Harrowing by Dan Coxon

The newest collection from award-winning writer, Dan Coxon, Come Sing for the Harrowing is a terrifying menagerie of the strange and weird. Unsettling, poignant, and always masterfully crafted, these 16 stories are a feast of folk horror where the fine line between the mundane and the malevolent is blurred beyond repair.

With five never-before-published stories as well as tales featured in publications such as Beyond the Veil and Great British Horror 7, this collection is a tour de force from one of the most talented rising stars in the horror fiction landscape.

Praise for Come Sing for the Harrowing by Dan Coxon

“Deft and subtle…Coxon extends and complicates the domain of folk horror and the weird in important ways.”- Brian Evenson, award-winning author of

Songs for the Unraveling of the World

“Sinister and deeply affecting, Dan Coxon’s remarkable collection is too compelling, too inventive to miss.” – Eric LaRocca, author of Things Have Gotten Worse Since We Last Spoke

“Dan Coxon expertly weaves modern gothic and folk horror. Come Sing for the Harrowing brims with specters, blood-soaked occult rituals, and old, hungry gods. Salvation and damnation haunt these pages, locked in an infernal embrace.” – Laird Barron, award-winning author of Not a Speck of Light

“In Come Sing for the Harrowing, Dan Coxon brings his beautifully rhythmic prose to tales of folk horror, cosmic horror, and the weird…stunning images and evocative settings throughout.” – Christi Nogle, award-winning author of The Best of our Past, the Worst of Our Future

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