Elizabeth Kim What compelled you to produce this book?
Hollie Starling Two things that both came out of writing my first book, The Bleeding Tree (2023). First was a sense of having snuck into an industry that, when you’re an outsider, can often feel impenetrable. When you have no connections so much of the process of getting a book published is simply mystifying. I had to teach myself everything, with my face pressed against the window! That is until I found my wonderful agent Joanna, who now answers all of my questions, as well as dealing with any crises of confidence. But while I had no network or resources in publishing I am aware that getting an agent, being furloughed from my day job and having the time to work on a proposal, having the resources to put together an eye-catching brief: all of it is a privilege. Even now I am by no means ‘well connected’ but I knew that as soon as I was through the door I wanted to hold it open for others. So, perhaps even a bit cynically, I devised the perfect way to give other unpublished writers from a working-class background a leg-up; by smuggling them into an anthology with visible, marketable names.
The other reason I wanted to produce a collection from working class writers is more personal. Writing my memoir meant I had to confront my ancestry beyond the sort of skim-reading level comprehension I had had previously. The book discusses masculinity alongside male folk figures, and I suddenly, very belatedly, understood that the boys and men in my family tree were irrevocably shaped by their cultural and economic realities, often directly leading to so many of their violent or premature deaths. I knew I had grown up in a working-class household, but I’d let any self-identification fall by the wayside as my own circumstances became more diffuse. As I write about in the introduction, defining class is often complicated and fraught with emotion, and I am still working through elements of internalised snobbery I suspect I carried, especially during young adulthood. But writing about my family and the folk culture of ordinary people made me proud of where I came from, not despite the hardships or epigenetic trauma, but because of the resilience that runs irrepressible down the line. I hope I’ve inherited just a little of it.
EK Did you have a sense of the kinds of stories you wanted to include?
HS Folk horror is such a thrilling space to be working in because of its diversity. It is such a deep well. There are some tropes we all think of, like robe-wearing cults, standing stones, and human sacrifice, but that so much scholarly discussion has sprung up around the genre in recent years is testament to how difficult an exact definition can be to pin down. At the moment I am writing a book that will be a sort of handbook to folk horror cinema, TV and literature, but I already know there will be people who complain that I’ve excluded a key text, or insist such-and-such isn’t an example of folk horror, actually. But that slipperiness in itself is so interesting to me. So my biggest ambition for Bog People was to demonstrate the breadth of the genre and really push at its boundaries.
I am biased but think we did a great job, honestly. What each of our amazing contributors handed in surpassed my hopes; apparently they knew instinctively that the genre is most interesting in its less well-trod terrain. So we have some superb cult stories that subvert your expectations of cults; instead of the more commonplace historical-rural we have stories located in contemporary urban settings; and stories in the hauntological mode that play with non-standard temporality. Folk horror is now international but it’s fair to say it originated here, so I wanted to make sure we represented voices from across the whole country too. Finally, while folk horror is unavoidably horrific, whether the assault is physical or psychological, I did want to make room for resistance and subversion, where it is the oppressor rather than the ‘peasant’ that meets their comeuppance.
EK It’s a masterful anthology. How did you find the new voices?
HS I was so happy that my idea to include unpublished working class writers in the line-up was embraced from the start. The Chatto & Windus x Bog People Competition ran last summer and any fears I had that no one would enter were quickly laid to rest! I spent a lot of lovely light evenings sitting on my balcony with a pile of submissions. The standard was phenomenal, which to be honest was a bit of a pain; my dedication to absolute fairness would not allow anything other than a massive spreadsheet with carefully colour-coded scoring criteria. Still even with this system, with the quality so high it was a really tough decision.
The whole enterprise was self-serving to be honest, because I found two of my new favourite writers in the winners! Daniel Draper’s ‘Perpetual Stew’ is delightfully nauseating and completely original, and Mark Colbourne’s slow-burn, paying homage to 70s folk rockers and the decade that birthed the genre, might be the most frightening thing I’ve read this year. I’m just chuffed everyone else gets to know them now too.
EK Is this your first foray into writing fiction?
HS I don’t remember a time when I didn’t write fiction. My mum always encouraged us in creative things, my brother and I were surrounded by library books growing up, and we’d always be coming up with silly stories and poems for one another. But one of the most stupid rules of being a teenager is you must be embarrassed by the things you love. So then I wrote in secret, and that sort of just continued into my twenties. Though by then writing on the side was more of a way to deal with wage slavery. I think that having a creative life is vital when your identity feels compromised by outside pressures, and I’m grateful I always had that outlet. Still, I didn’t then know that the most important lesson of writing is that you must share it. Keeping it in darkness because it is ‘not ready’ is certain death; perfect is the enemy of the good.
The only reason The Bleeding Tree ever saw the light of day is because the very experience of grief it discusses freed me from perfection. The worst thing that I could imagine had happened already, so who cares if a publisher doesn’t like my stuff? Happily they did, and I was fully supported in writing the book I wanted, which included five fictional passages each centred around a different tree myth. Having my fiction received well allowed me to start submitting short stories to various online and print publications and fired my imagination in all sorts of directions. I rarely have fewer than five projects on the go. So around the upcoming non-fiction book I am also working (slowly) on a novel.
EK What was the inspiration behind your contribution to the collection, ‘Yellowbelly’?
HS A yellowbelly is the slang name for a person from Lincolnshire. It has a few reported origins; yellow was the traditional livery colour of the Lincolnshire Regiment, but the phrase may also have arisen from the yellow clay of the fens or rape crop of the county’s vast agricultural land and the colour it left of the undersides of the grazing animals. To stir the pot I wanted to add another possible origin story of my own. Yellow also has an association with cowardice, so I used that as a starting point for a squalid little tale of misogyny and exploitation. The narrator is a working-class boy who ‘escaped’ but who is forced to return, and he brings back with him an uneasy relationship to ‘home.’ I’m fascinated by the concept of aspiration, that great Thatcherite concept where ‘social mobility’ is assumed to be incontestably positive and wanted. But a side effect, I think especially for people who were the first in their families to go to university, can be community alienation, a sort of suspicion between generations, the tension of having ‘bettered’ oneself and accusation of ‘forgetting where you came from.’ In this way my narrator isn’t a straight-forward nasty piece of work, but a product of some particular late-century social conditions not of his choosing. Though, crucially, he has a choice: where he loses sympathy is in punching down. The women around him, informed by countless nameless Lincolnshire women of times past, face the consequences. But it is their combined multitude that allows them a voice.
EK A problem with folk horror is the frequent othering of non-standardised, marginalised beliefs. As Ronald Hutton points out in Queens of the Wild, The Wicker Man temporarily reverses our sympathies: the policeman who visits Summerisle is an uptight, closed-minded, and sanctimonious Christian, shocked by this alternative religion – a celebration of the natural world, fertility, and life. In the end, however, “the basic message of the genre is powerfully reasserted”, when the policeman is ritually sacrificed in a horrific manner. How can working class people flip the script?
HS That’s really the central tension in folk horror. The ‘folk’ (supposedly ordinary rural people with their own beliefs, rituals, and customs) often end up portrayed as terrifying, irrational, or murderous. The genre both romanticises and demonises the ‘margins’, which may be depicted as pagan or otherwise alternative ways of being outside of dominant religious or social orders. The Wicker Man is everyone’s entry point into the genre and it is of course a masterpiece, but I think to assume every example is in the same key, ie. reinscribing ‘difference = threat’ through the horror of sacrifice and resolution via a return to ‘order’, somewhat flattens a very diverse genre.
Nigel Kneale’s 1975 teleplay Murrain is a great counter example. Visiting vet Mr Crich is the Sergeant Howie here, also representing rationality and modernity set against rural superstitions, however he does not cut much of a sympathetic figure. To see him have to abandon his beliefs at the end is quite satisfying, even though it means siding with potentially murderous influences.
To ‘flip the script’ might involve reclaiming folk practices as cultural heritage rather than threat, with bottom-up ownership. Penda’s Fen, one of the most famous installments of A Play for Today, depicts the identity crisis of a teenage boy under the weight of ‘Englishness’, especially those elements inherited from an establishment that holds up a traditional, conservative, colonial elitism. The ending is elegiac and quite beautiful; the solace is found in the pre-Christian landscape, allowing the protagonist to accept both his queerness and his foreign ancestry, quite a radical message for 1974.
To me, folk culture is a living expression of working people. When the history books do not record their names it is how we know they existed. There is so much that folk horror creators can exploit from this concept. Folk ritual not as bloodthirsty spectacle but as counter-power to aristocracy, landlords, or corporations. Horror arising from losing connection with land, community, or history, not from those who preserve it. Perhaps it can ask why some beliefs inform how a society is governed while others are ‘superstition’? Or draw attention to the use of othering to police and control and divide factions, and offer up class solidarity instead. Folk horror may be the best genre to remind us that there are more of us than them.
Bog People : A Working-Class Anthology of Folk Horror, edited by Hollie Starling, is published by Chatto & Windus.