Only the Broken Remain: A Unique Collection of Weird Fiction

What is weird fiction, and when does weird fiction morph into horror fiction? That question has been bouncing around my head for a few weeks since finishing Only the Broken Remain, the new collection of short stories from Dan Coxon. 

While none of the stories would be classed as horror by the more traditional or dyed-in-the-wool horror reviewer, there is no overt horror here, no scenes of graphic violence, no classic monsters stalking you through the pages., and there isn’t even a blonde-haired, blue-eyed, square-jawed hero to save the day. Instead, you have a collection of stories in the liminal areas between the genre worlds.

Worlds where the mundane becomes menacing, sadness, loneliness and despair breed stories that crush your soul with elegant heartache. Don’t come into this anthology looking for a happy ending; that’s just not going to happen. Despite its lack of “horror”, this collection, more than any other I’ve read this year, left me feeling emotionally beaten up.  

When describing Dan Coxon’s writing, words such as dreamlike, ambiguous, sad, cryptic and enigmatic immediately emerge.

The stories presented here are designed to make you ponder the narratives presented. Even the most basic of stories, in terms of the intent and delivery of the message, are layered in such a way that while you may initially think you have gotten everything from the story as you read it, it will live inside your head, pushing away at your grey matter reveal hidden depths and meanings that you missed when you first read it.  

The opening story, “Stanislav in Foxtown”, is one such story on the surface.

It’s a simple tale of a man befriending a group of urban foxes who help him step up the life ladder. It is the happiest story in the collection, but remember, happiness is relative and the parallels between the urban decay of the town and the mutual malice that the takeaway owner has for the foxes and his immigrant worker. It is a simple but effective opener for what is to come with the rest of the collection. Coxon injects a strong sense of mystery and mysticism into the disenchanted world of Foxtown.  

Some of us dream about running away to the circus, something I’ve never fully understood; who would want to live in a cramped caravan surrounded by animal smells and clowns? In “Roll up, Roll Up”, Robbie doesn’t necessarily run away to the circus; the circus came to him.

And in proper horror terms, the circus is just as chilling and frightening as your worst nightmares could ever imagine. And yet there is a small glimmer of hope here; while Robbie’s role in the circus is revealed, we realise that he has finally found his place in the world and a family to belong to. “Roll up, Roll Up” reads like a mash-up between Freaks and Cabal, with Coxon blending the terror elicited by Freaks with Cabal’s sense of wonder and belonging while maintaining its identity as a short story.  

“Only the Broken Remain” is a terrifying take on the haunted house trope.

Coxon elicits an all-encompassing sense of claustrophobic fear as we witness what seems to be a descent into madness from our broken protagonist. Like many of the stories here, a powerful sense of poignancy and sadness envelopes the narrative. There is a lot to digest here; it’s a classic example of a story that is open to many interpretations. Is the house haunted, or is the haunting a manifestation of the broken life of the protagonist?  

Many of the tales also involve characters finally becoming accepting of themselves and finding release in numerous ways, “Feather and Twine” is one such story, a captivating story of a broken man finally seeing an escape from the banalities of life and world that doesn’t understand him after a chance encounter with a fantastical creature. 

“Miriam is Not at Her Desk.” Wow, what can you say about this headscratcher of a story?

bursting with metaphor, this story is perfect for a book group; I’m not sure I fully understood it beyond a woman disappearing uniquely after robbing her company of a fortune. However, this is a fantastic tale that wouldn’t be out of place in an episode of Black Mirror, with its hypnotic narrative evoking the dreamlike magic of Aboriginal Australia. 

“Baddavine” is a killer folk horror tale.

And if I were forced to name my favourite story in this excellent collection, it would have to be this one. At its heart, this is a simple tale: a creature is haunting the woods, and the locals don’t like it, it hasn’t done anything, and it hasn’t killed anyone, but its nightly cries are too much for the narrow-minded insular locals, and they set out to hunt it down and kill it.  

It has been close to four weeks since I read this story, and even now, I am filled with deep sadness whenever I think about the sheer heartbreaking narrative. Right from the first paragraph, Coxon makes it clear that this is going to be a story filled with dread, but that dread soon turns to abject horror as the locals devolve into brutal animals looking to kill a lost and forlorn creature.

The scenes between Baddavine and the mob are genuinely chilling; you can feel Baddavine’s fear and anguish right in the centre of your soul, bringing forth a sadness that is only matched by your anger at the mob mentality of the village folk fearful of something that isn’t like them.  

“Static Ritual”, co-written with Dan Carpenter, uses a fractured timescale of events to create a paranoia-filled reductive narrative where the world is always on instant replay. Where a mysterious videotape sends the protagonist down a path of obsessive behaviour,

The final two stories I’m going to highlight bring a bit of welcome light relief to the otherwise dark theme of this collection.  

“No One’s Child” is a gleefully macabre tale of a WW2 evacuee being sent out to a stately country house where she clashes with the stern matriarch of the household. A chance encounter with a creature living in the depths of the house brings an opportunity for her to climb the ranks of the house and get revenge on the matriarch. However, sometimes the status quo is better than the alternative. Mixing Three Kids and It with Basket Case, “No One’s Child” revels in the dark humour presented here. 

“All the Letters in His Van” pushes the envelope of weird fiction to brush up against its bizarro cousin. When a couple gets stuck in a foggy village, everything seems rather pleasant at first, but with the arrival of the enigmatic Postman, things take on a much darker hue. Those of us of a certain age will love this nod to classic children’s TV, and if you are like me, you will get a great deal of satisfaction in knowing that you aren’t the only one who found those quaint villages populated by the likes of Pugh, Pugh, Barney McGrew, Cuthbert, Dibble, Grubb to be way creepier than they let on.  

This absurdist tale is a great way to finish off this collection.

While many of the stories presented here allow the characters some form a sad release from the horror of their lives, “All the Letters in His Van” shows that while we might think there is an escape from it all, we are merely just trapped in the confines of some almighty deity TV show.  

Only the Broken Remain is the perfect anthology for 2020, with many of the stories on offer here resonating with the life many of us have lived through this year. We have all been touched by the events in the world, and we have all become broken to some degree or other.  

Only the Broken Remain beautifully reflects the sadness that has grown within us with its evocative and poetic writing, combined with a powerful use of ambiguity and a profound use of a lack of conclusion to the lives etched into the beating heart of this collection, you will be left with a comforting emptiness inside from knowing that you aren’t alone in being broken, battered and bruised. 

Only the Broken Remain by Dan Coxon

“I could see into the room well enough, but there was nothing there. No furniture, no ornaments. A rusted sink streaked with black and grey. An empty light fitting. Nothing more than a thick layer of dust on tired linoleum, forming a furred carpet that stretched undisturbed into the empty room beyond… There was no neighbour. It occurred to me for the first time that I might be going mad.”A young man joins a circus where the mysterious ringmaster is more interested in watching him fail. An immigrant worker forms an unlikely alliance with his housing estate’s foxes. A fraudulent accountant goes on the run, but loses herself in the dry heat of Australia.

This debut collection from Dan Coxon unearths the no man’s land between dreams and nightmares, a place where the strange is constantly threatening to seep through into our everyday reality. Populated by the lost and the downtrodden, the forgotten and the estranged, these stories follow in the tradition of Thomas Ligotti, Robert Aickman and Joel Lane. Because when the dust has settled and the blood has been washed away, Only the Broken Remain.“Dan Coxon’s subtle, delightfully dark tales creep up on you from the shadows, then refuse to let you go. I devoured these stories about crises of identity and reality being undermined after glimpsing something inexplicable from the corner of your eye.” —Tim Major, author of Snakeskins and Hope Island

“Coxon writes stories filled with surreal, precise menace.

Only the Broken Remain gripped me throughout.”—Aliya Whiteley, author of The Beauty and The Loosening Skin

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