Starting in September with a dark academia theme, Sylvan Way’s online book group Dark Vibes Only (focusing on horror, true crime, and noir) illustrates the popularity of a good scare or creep-fest amongst our Kitsap reading community. With this in mind, we turn our attention to Folk Horror (scheduled to be discussed in the November book group), a subgenre that has seen a marked increase in fans over the last few years.
As a literary genre, horror creates a deep emotional sense of foreboding and menace, evoking terror in readers from start to finish. Horror fiction usually features some type of monster (real or imaginary), and supernatural elements are often involved. Within this broad framework authors play with settings, style, and themes to create a universe of options for all tastes. Folk horror lives in this universe, combining elements of rural settings, folklore, the clash between old and new, scary group dynamics, and a tense relationship with the land. As with most genres, there are many discussions about what falls into a specific category, but here are some things to explore as you delve further.
How to Find More
- Try using these keywords alone or paired with ‘horror’ in your catalog search: horror tales, gothic, haunted places, witches, small towns, folk, folklore, legends, rural life, villages, legendary character, forests, mountain life, social isolation, southern gothic, tradition, urban legends. Then, filter your results by content.
- Check out the community and staff lists on the library’s catalog that also include books you liked within this subgenre.
- Look into Novelist Plus for more suggestions. You can find specific lists such as “Folk Horror” or search using similar keywords as your library catalog search (these terms can also be used in a search engine such as Google, your results will vary.)
- Follow Horror fiction online resources for folk horror discovery:
- Use the BookMatch or Book-a-Librarian services to get individualized help, for reading suggestions or tutorials on navigating the library catalog.
Additional authors who write or have dabbled in the Folk Horror subgenre:
- Ramsey Campbell
- Adam Nevill
- Arthur Machen
- Thomas Tryon
- Elizabeth Hand
- Andy Davidson
- Christopher Golden
- Castro
- Gina Farago
- James Brogden
- Fiona Barnett
- Jennifer Thorne
Try these next...
- Devil's Day by Andrew Michael Hurley
John Pentecost returns to his family farm each autumn to gather the sheep down from the moors, but this year, his grandfather has died, and with him, the village's protection from the Devil.
- The Gathering Dark edited by Tori Bovalino
A cemetery full of the restless dead. A town so wicked it has already burned twice, with the breath of the third fire looming. A rural, isolated bridge with a terrifying monster waiting for the completion of its summoning ritual. A lake that allows the drowned to return, though they have been changed by the claws of death. These are the shadowed, liminal spaces where the curses and monsters lurk, refusing to be forgotten.
- Hex by Thomas Olde Heuvelt
Black Spring is home to the ghost of Katherine van Wyler, an alleged witch who was tortured and hanged in the 1600s. Eyes and lips sewn shut, she visits the town's residents, ominously coming and going in their houses whenever she wants. But for residents to leave Black Spring would be to invite disaster, so the town's leaders have taken measures to keep it quarantined. Then a group of boys decides Katherine needs an Internet presence, and horrendous chaos breaks out.
- Midwestern Gothic by Scott Thomas
Establishing himself as the master of Midwestern Gothic, the author brings a terrifying new perspective to the American heartland, where he takes a hatchet to the idyllic tropes through three stories in which the characters face unimaginable evil.
- Red Rabbit by Alex Grecian
A folk horror epic about a ragtag posse that must track down a witch through a wild west beset by demons and ghosts—and where death is always just around the bend.
- The Twisted Ones by T. Kingfisher
When a young woman clears out her deceased grandmother’s home in rural North Carolina, she finds long-hidden secrets about a strange colony of beings in the woods.
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