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Emma Coleman
(NewCon Press, August 2023)
Review by Andy Hedgecock
NEWCON PRESS’S POLESTARS are books by writers considered to be the brightest stars in their patch of the literary firmament. The Glasshouse is the third of an inaugural trio of single author story collections.
The title of the series flings down a gauntlet to reviewers. Let’s accept the NewCon challenge and consider how brightly Emma Coleman shines in the constellations of rural horror and folklore infused dark fantasy.
There are thirteen tales: some respectfully rework the subgenres they draw upon; others bring a more subversive approach to the traditions of dark fantasy.
The book opens with “Five Small Boys”, a deftly handled and thorough-ly unsettling story that sets appropriate expectations for the collection as a whole. One summer’s day the eponymous young lads brave country lanes on their bikes, recklessly and joyfully riding hands-free until they arrive at the crumbling stonework of an abandoned farm. There’s a shocking lurch from quotidian childhood adventure into something genuinely disturbing—it’s sudden, but by no means unearned; and the ending has genuine emotional heft.
There is a strange alchemy at play in this, one of Coleman’s more traditional tales. She uses time-honoured symbolism to tap into atavistic dreads, but there is a sharp specificity at work in her prose. There’s the banter of the kids; the CW handlebars and mushroom grips of a BMX bike; the honk of a Ford Escort’s horn; a fireplace, ‘black as tar’; and a wobbly stair-rail: imagery and detail that takes us to a recognisable place at a particular time.
Coleman’s rigorous observations prompt recall from both episodic and semantic memory. And it will have a unique emotional impact for every reader. For example, there was a moment that reminded me of a scene in the movie Stand by Me, and another that made me think of the notorious public information film, The Spirit of Dark and Lonely Water. For younger readers, “Five Small Boys” will elicit memories of very different experiences and cultural points of reference.
“He Who Saw the Abyss” is another story drawing on multiple traditions in weird fiction. Set in an era in which separation and divorce meant scandal, it opens with a vulnerable woman surviving a failed marriage. Dulcie flees her cruel husband, moves to the village of Clipsdene on the Leicestershire-Northamptonshire border, and is shunned by her new neighbours who are deeply suspicious of outsiders—particularly those deemed to be lacking in respectability. Troubling enough, but an ancient evil from an earlier century is about to enter her life. This time, the imminent switch from the everyday to the eerie is subtly signposted, but the hair-raising imagery and infernal allusions of the closing pages are no less startling for that.
The core of the story read like a collision of M.R. James’s “Count Magnus” and John Bowen’s Play for Today episode, “Robin Redbreast”, a folk horror classic avant la lettre. This isn’t a complaint. Coleman’s intro-duction to the book sets out her passions and inspirations quite openly. This tale, like several in the book, blends familiar dark fantasy tropes—from print and performance—and forges them into something entirely fresh.
Coleman takes a very different approach in “Home”. First-person musings on a scene of bucolic bliss are disrupted by the arrival of a strange interloper. What follows is a linear sequence of disquieting, dreamlike encounters. There are jump cuts in the action, and dramatic non-sequiturs—moments that prompt the thought, ‘hang on, how did we get here?’ This is a deeply affecting story, a softly spoken tour de force of oneiric horror, but one that demands an acceptance of ambiguity. It’s an idiorhythmic story, in which the tradition arcs of life and time have been dismantled and replaced with a strange but consistent logic. Tangled up in this, illuminated by flashes of beauty and abjection, is the gleaming gem of Coleman’s writing at its best. This is storytelling with an uncanny (pun intended) aptitude for structure and control—her revelations are perfectly paced and ideally placed.
The writing isn’t perfect. There are passages in which the style is a little flat, there’s the occasional clunky sentence, but the moods Coleman works so sedulously to create are barely broken by these.
It’s hard to discuss the title story in detail: to do so risks stumbling into a minefield of spoilers. It is Coleman at her subtlest—a vivid but dreamlike riff on irredeemable misperception and loss. Cleverly constructed and genuinely surprising, “The Glass-house” has the spare and abstract clarity of a fairytale; but the form is transcended by the story’s psycho-logical depth. It’s impossible to read without getting sucked into the narrator’s grief.
“The Magic Trick by Boz Boole” showcases Coleman’s flair for pastiche. It opens with a late nineteenth century circus poster, crammed with period detail and hyperbole extolling the virtues of the many acts on offer to an audience for 4d per person. Think of John Lennon’s “Being for the Benefit of Mr Kite!” and you’ll be near the mark. It’s a wonderfully realised period piece, set at the end of the nineteenth century. A dark morality play on which the severity of the punishment vastly exceeds the impact of the crime, it centres on a gruesome magic trick and—as with many of the stories in the collection—plays on fears that have little basis in rationality but reflect insecurities deep in the human unconscious.
This is a deeply affecting and entertaining collection—very moreish. Each story creates an anticipation for the next. I remember a similar sense of enjoyment when I borrowed John Wyndham’s Jizzle from Doncaster Library, fifty years ago. This is a well-deserved compliment, rather than an inflated claim in the style of the Boz Boole circus poster: I can think of no higher praise.
Coleman’s use of Northamptonshire locations and period settings in The Glasshouse reflects her fascination with nature and history, but these choices are vital in sustaining the double-edged nature of her stories. They tether her more ambitious flights of fancy to the realities of quotidian experience. At the same time, they hint at a universal set of symbols and archetypes that break the bounds of place and time.
This powerful set of stories highlights the role of collective memory in determining our fears and uncertainties. For me, it proposes the irrational as an inescapable aspect of human consciousness. Emma Coleman is a powerful mythmaker, a writer to watch.