Review: The Haunting Season: Ghostly Tales for Long Winter Nights

I’ve been keen to read this collection since I first heard about it in January 2021, and it seems I wasn’t the only one; it’s the first short story collection to hit the Sunday Times bestseller list since records began, and there are now a shortage of copies! I can kind of see why; this features a stellar line-up of writers who’ve all had big success with at least one book group/accessible literary novel, and it was published at exactly the right time of year, with gorgeous cover art. However, writing short stories is a very different art to writing novels, so would The Haunting Season deliver?

Unsurprisingly for a multiple-author collection, I thought this was a mixed bag, but one which did give me the cozy, spooky reading experience I was looking for, even if some of the stories worked better for me than others. Spooky, ghostly and scary stories are, perhaps, particularly subjective, and it doesn’t help that the ‘ghost story’ is, in my opinion, a very different genre from the ‘horror’ or ‘scary’ story, and this collection brings both together. Personally, I prefer horror stories to ghost stories, and have no time at all for friendly ghosts, so there were a few stories here that were never going to work for me, like Imogen Hermes Gowar’s ‘Thwaite’s Tenant’ (though, even putting my own preferences aside, I thought this was a disappointingly bland story for a writer who produced a novel as original as The Mermaid and Mrs Hancock). On the other end of the spectrum, Jess Kidd’s ‘Lily Wilt’ reminded me of some of H.P. Lovecraft’s less tasteful body horror, particularly his short story ‘Cool Air’, and wasn’t my thing at all. And while I liked the stories by Kiran Millwood Hargrave and Elizabeth Macneal, I’m less interested in psychological horror, where the reader is left uncertain whether what’s truly happening is real, than in full-blown supernatural fear. 

Given I’m a massive Natasha Pulley fan, I wasn’t surprised that her contribution, ‘The Eel Singers’, was my favourite story in the collection. It’s hard for me to know how this would read to someone who isn’t familiar with her novels The Watchmaker of Filigree Street and The Lost Future of Pepperharrow, because it features their protagonists. However, I thought this was perfectly eerie, evoking the fen landscape and leaving just the right amount unexplained. In contrast, Bridget Collins’s ‘A Study in Black and White’ had a wonderfully chilling central idea, but spent too much time on set-up and seemed to stop just as it got going. Another favourite in the collection for me was Laura Purcell’s ‘The Chillingham Chair’. I didn’t get on with her novels The Silent Companions and (especially) The Corset, but this demonstrated that what might seem thin in a novel works well in a short story; as she does in The Silent Companions, Purcell picks a real historical object – in this case, an early kind of wheelchair – and scares her reader with what happens when it becomes animate. Formulaic, but fun.

All of these stories are historical, set in some undefined eighteenth or nineteenth century (Andrew Michael Hurley’s disappointing contribution, ‘The Hanging of the Greens’, is the only one that feels a bit more modern.) This works for this collection, harking back to the golden age of Victorian ghost stories, but it also leaves it feeling somewhat traditional as a whole. The best stories, like the one by Pulley, are the ones that push the boundaries.