Review by Sally Shaw of "Red Runs the Witch's Thread" by Victoria Williamson

Red Runs the Witch’s Thread is a novella by Scottish author Victoria Williamson. It’s a story of the impact of a young girl’s perception of childhood, puberty, childbirth and society’s expectations. 

The year is 1722. Christian and her maid Meg visit Paisley, to sell Christian’s white skein of thread to a merchant. The merchant treats them with contempt and no deal is made. Meg wants to protect her mistress but she knows better than to speak out. Once on the street she tells her mistress her thoughts but Christian can only hear one thing: "The blood was pounding in her ears, drumming out a single dreadful word that thundered up from the depths of her memory and drowned out every other sound. Witch. Witch. WITCH!"

Christian is a woman driven to ensure the economic stability of her family and home, Bargarran House. She believes that by producing the purest white thread and enhancing its production will provide security: "The hand-powered twist mill that would allow a dozen spindles of her hand-spun linen to be twisted into strong thread all at once would revolutionise linen commerce in Scotland." But Christian’s memories return her to her childhood, taking her out of herself, "Christian Shaw, the child who was bewitched." The story moves back and forth from 1696/7 to 1722. On this journey Christian’s mind and strength unravel as she is led to facing the truth behind her being bewitched and the consequences to her family and those who have contact with her. 

Williamson is able to create the atmosphere of the time, how society interpreted the functions of the human body and the individual's behaviour. The story highlights the history of witches and the human beings who were singled out as different and misunderstood. 

As Christian travels towards her own truth and identity, she is watched over by her loyal maid Meg and observed by the Ravens. Ultimately the power of the Ravens will lead to discoveries. I found this book has made me aware of how misunderstanding, fear and lack of knowledge can inflict pain and loss on communities and create mistrust within societies. What is a witch is difficult to know, Christian’s story provides an insight into the witch trials and their importance within history and the modern world.

About the reviewer
Sally Shaw has an MA Creative Writing from the University of Leicester. She gains inspiration from old photographs, history, childhood memories, and is inspired by writers Sandra Cisneros, Deborah Morgan, Liz Berry and Emily Dickinson. She has short stories and poetry published in various online publications including The Ink Pantry, AnotherNorth, Roi Faineant Press. Sally lives in the countryside. 

Review by Maria Taylor of "Ambush at Still Lake" by Caroline Bird

It’s been said that humour often comes from a serious place. That concept can be easily applied to Caroline Bird’s Ambush at Still Lake. Themes such as parenthood, marriage, addiction and recovery are turned on their head in Bird’s surreal and animated collection of poems. In Bird’s prose poem ‘The Addict Impersonator Contest,’ addiction itself is quite literally turned on its head: 

                                                                                               True self-hate
          Takes years to master like the Handstand Scorpion Pose in yoga, or
          Jazz drumming…

The humour here is wry, perhaps even uncomfortable, but  it also dances with the truth. The poem ends with a distortion of the speaker’s mimicked addiction with real-life hurt. I felt the irony of the judges’ description of it being ‘the realest routine they’d ever seen’ and felt the punch of ‘Mum and Dad crying with pride.’ Bird understands how humour and tragedy cause friction when woven together. There’s an intuitive awareness of this that often has startling results. 

Throughout the collection, rich images and strange confessions jump out at you. Experiencing a Bird poem requires a suspension of disbelief which I was more than happy to go along with. We live in a strange and complex world and Bird’s poems allow us to navigate the strangeness in an engrossing, vivid way. In ‘Starter Marriage,’ for instance, the speaker in the poem invites everyone to their wedding, including a BT Operator who kept them on hold for ‘forty minutes in 2007.’ Is Bird perchance saying that we live in a society in which most individual relationships are based on shallow connections – or is it just straight-up funny? Or both? What I especially like about Bird’s poems is the reluctance to come up with answers. Instead the speaker and the phone operator dance together, ‘reminiscing / under a marquee of stars,’ to what else but the ‘synthesised’ tune of Greensleeves that brought them together. 

In ‘The Baby Monitor,’ a sinister scenario occurs when a baby monitor becomes a living being, long after the actual baby has grown into a child at ‘preschool.’ There is something universal about the monitor itself being an object parents fixate on – and perhaps that stress never goes away:

                I sat through parents’ evening
          Like a killer in the dock, Knowing
          The monitor was home alone 
          Crying to an empty room.

For all the humour here, it’s also surprisingly chilling! 

Bird’s poems have a spontaneous feel, as if they’ve sprung from a place where humour and pain co-exist. Perhaps when someone has been through a great deal, they appreciate that the so called ‘happy ever after’ of marriage is not a wholly trustworthy thing. In the collection’s title poem, ‘Ambush at Still Lake,’ it’s the placid lake itself which offers an answer of sorts to the manic nature of life: ‘We carry on / dying forever, always almost home.’ 

About the reviewer
Maria Taylor is a British Cypriot poet and reviewer. Her latest collection is Dressing for the Afterlife (Nine Arches Press). Her debut collection of poetry, Melanchrini, was shortlisted for the Michael Murphy Memorial Prize. She has been published widely, including poems and reviews in The Guardian, Magma and The Times Literary Supplement. She has been highly commended in the UK Forward Prizes for poetry. She also works as Reviews Editor for Under the Radar. 

Review by Alan McCormick of "Precipitation" by Ailsa Cox, with illustrations by Patricia Farrell

Precipitation is the fifth in a series of small, illustrated story collections from the independent Manchester based publisher Confingo. Precipitation has three stories of frail characters from the city, faltering in alluring yet foreboding settings. There are echoes of David Constantine’s stories in the nuanced, empathetic characterisations and subtle lyrical handling of dramatic natural elements, the incessant rain falling through the ravines and scarred slopes of West Yorkshire and North Wales. 

In the first story, ‘Heavy Showers and Thunder,’ I was initially resistant to the seemingly novelistic back and forth cast of divergent characters, the multi-layered use of shifting time and back story. Within a few pages I was hooked. Luke seeks shelter on a desperate drenched cycle ride in the Calderdale hills with his ex-in-laws George and Barbara. He is escaping his new family home in the city. Middle-class and urban, he is an outsider in the rural landscape, in his ex-in-laws’ small village home. Tightly wrought grievances, social and political differences, and unquenched grief permeate their night together. Their daughter, Cass, Luke’s first wife, had died in a climbing accident years before and Barbara blames Luke. George and Barbara’s teenage granddaughter rarely contacts them anymore, and life hasn’t healed or moved on for them. Fuelled by a few drinks, George conveys Barbara’s resentment and blaming to Luke, who bridles, then retreats to the emotional ‘time-warp’ of Cass’s old moth-infested bedroom. 

Ailsa Cox is unafraid of putting a writer centre stage – the frustrated novelist Jason in ‘The Empty Quarter’ and the poet Fleur in ‘Stan’s House.’ Fleur came from Manchester with her partner (outsiders again) to live in Bethel Street, the same fictional Calderdale setting for ‘Heavy Showers and Thunder.’ Initially full of naïve optimism and excitement, the elements and surroundings soon close in and get the better of her. She encounters a malevolent old woman Yvonne, who she christens Miss Havisham. The old lady casts a spell, picking at her vulnerabilities, her aloneness. Initially repelled, Fleur becomes obsessed, her antennae piqued when learning that Yvonne once had a brother, a wild drunken poet called Stan – giving name to ‘Stan’s House.’ Fleur ends up as Yvonne had predicted, alone, when her partner moves out, the two women left somehow invisibly drawn together despite themselves. Stan and Fleur, two failing poets floundering in the exposing elements, also suggested Sylvia Plath’s grave in Calderdale’s Heptonstall, Ted Hughes’ family farm home nestled a mile away amongst the brooding escarpments.      

In ‘The Empty Quarter’ a hollowed-out novelist, Jason, can only think to escape his disappointing life and fulfil a long-held longing to reinvoke Wilfred Thesiger’s Arabian journeys, not by visiting there, but by imagining it from the lonely outpost of his writer friend’s neglected Welsh cottage. He loses himself in the mix, the incessant rain and isolation, a backdrop to his imaginary breakouts into the desert.

I was reminded of Tessa Hadley and Alice Munro (and then discovered Ailsa Cox has written a book about Munro) in the psychological depth of her stories that extend well beyond the page, so you think about the characters long after reading about them. So much is left unsaid, shadows creeping in from the past, from complex painful family dynamics. Life and feeling are brought naturally, three-dimensionally into the present, in these fragile characters’ thwarted attempts to maintain relationships, fulfil longings and escape disappointing lives. 

Shadowy pasts and character’s yearnings are skilfully invoked by Patricia Farrell’s accompanying black and white illustrations. It’s a wonderful mix and a great collection that left me enthralled and wanting more.

About the reviewer
Alan McCormick lives in Wicklow. He writes fiction and memoir. Recent writing has appeared in The Stinging Fly, Banshee, The Lonely Crowd, Exacting Clam, Southword and Culture Matters. His website is here.

You can read more about Precipitation on Creative Writing at Leicester here. 

Review by Neil Fulwood of "New and Selected Poems" by Julian Stannard

As usual, when a new collection of poetry lands on my desk, I open it at random and sample two or three poems to get a feel for tone, content and the author’s personal style, before reading the book in sequence and mulling over my review. At random in this case turned out to be page 21 and a poem called "Speed," which concerns itself with a volume of Rupi Kaur, a waste-paper basket and the peregrination of the one toward the other. Grinning devilishly, I flipped toward a hundred and some pages and alighted on "Closed," a wry state-of-the-nation piece which ends with a memorable redefinition of "Protestant Work Ethic." I stuck the kettle on, settled back and started at the beginning. I ripped through the book’s 247 pages in two sittings.

Let’s be honest: a lot of poetry can be po-faced. Overly serious, with humour regarded as the province of light verse, and light verse regarded as something of a pejorative. Hallelujah, then, for Julian Stannard, who gives us the best of both worlds: poetry that blends intellectual rigour, sterling craftsmanship and sly wit in a seemingly effortless manner. 

There’s a mordant Englishman abroad aesthetic in poems like "The Blessing of the Octopus at Lerici," "Piazza Della Posta Vecchia" and the magnificently titled "The Road to Bastardo," but mainly he achieves the kind of loose-limbed informality that was the trademark of the New York school (only without the attendant self-indulgence or tendency to the verbose). Not that Stannard aligns himself with any particular movement or trend. Simply, he doesn’t need to. And speaking of magnificent titles, wait till you experience the pure delirious joy of "The Gargantuan Muffin Beauty Contest." Or "Well-Regulated Dumplings." It takes some skill to fashion poems that live up to titles like these.

Flipping through the book once again - already it’s proving one of those handful of titles in my collection that I find myself instinctively drawn back to - I looked for something succinct, something I could quote in full, that would give the reader a flavour of the Julian Stannard experience. Almost immediately, "What Did I Find on Bogliasco Beach" presented itself:

         Bottle-tops, bottle-tops, bottle-tops
         grey stones and some smaller red ones too

         desiccated seaweed, stuff mostly
         and something that once hung from a tree.

         And oh yes I found a pair of lips.

To use a cliché more suited to film reviews, Stannard’s New & Selected is a wild ride. Do yourself a favour: buy a ticket; take the trip.

About the reviewer 
Neil Fulwood lives and works in Nottingham. He has published four full poetry collections with Shoestring Press, No Avoiding It, Can’t Take Me Anywhere, Service Cancelled, and The Point of the Stick, and a volume of political satires, Mad Parade, with Smokestack Books.

You can read more about New and Selected Poems by Julian Stannard on Creative Writing at Leicester here. 

Review by Kirsten Arcadio of "Android Author" by Sapphira Olson

"Eloise slipped in and out of consciousness, a flickering representation of reality played in her mind like images in a Victorian zoetrope." Set in a dystopian world where androids write novels, Android Author is a steam-punky romp that explores themes of creativity, artificial intelligence and the boundaries between humans and AI. 

The novel is colourfully meta, chopping between the narrative of its various protagonists and the texts they are writing. Wild and fast-paced, the novel makes interesting use of intertextuality with multiple references to To Kill a Mockingbird and overtones of George Orwell and Philip K. Dick.

Initially, the narrative follows the fate of an AI story-writing machine (Android Writer PD121928) whose sole purpose is to produce stories and novels, churning out a concoction of weird and wonderful stories including a 140-character "novel," the only one of its works that is accepted for publication. During the process the reader learns about the AI’s life: its cat, killed by a drone delivery, the late wife it dismantled because it had begun to "hate her a little bit," and the ever-present existential threat of being killed if its stories are not accepted by a publisher. After its demise, its stories are collected by Eloise, a human prostitute, who endeavours to keep them alive in a number of different ways. 

The world of this novel is a rich and varied futuristic landscape, full of all manner of funky androids, including Mary Whitehouse sex androids and Audrey Hepburn killer fembots. In this world, the old literary classics of a bygone human era are considered "filth" and Eloise’s plight to publish a story a lost cause. 

As the novel progresses, Eloise’s aim to bring authentic storytelling back into the world takes her on a kaleidoscopic journey through time with a scientist Umberto and a varied cast of androids on a spaceship not unlike The Heart of Gold in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. 

I thoroughly enjoyed Android Author. It’s a rich, psychedelic experience, perfect for fans of Douglas Adams, graphic novels, and speculative fiction that is original and fun. 

About the reviewer

Kirsten Arcadio is a novelist and digital marketing professional based in London and the East Midlands. She holds a PhD in Creative Writing from the University of Leicester. 

Review by Mike O'Driscoll of "PoppyHarp" by Simon Avery

It’s always a pleasure to encounter a new work from Simon Avery, whose evocative and humane short stories illuminated many issues of Black Static magazine before it folded. His superb novella, The Teardrop Method, is a hauntingly eloquent exploration of the nature of creativity and how it manifests in the work of a musician. The complex and compelling forces at play in the creative process seems to be a recurring theme and it’s one he returns to in his first novel, PoppyHarp, a much less austere and bleak work than the novella, but one still redolent with an air of sadness and lost opportunities.

The story focuses on writer Noah’s attempts to discover the fate of Oliver Frayling, creator of 1970s kids’ TV show The Adventures of Imogen and Florian, who had disappeared some years previous to the novel’s present. Noah reunites with Oliver’s daughter Imogen, a former girlfriend, who was the child star of the show alongside Florian, a somewhat down-at-heel rabbit. As the narrative unfolds through a series of elegantly structured flashbacks, we learn of Oliver’s fleeting success and the profound effect the brush with fame has on his life, particularly on his relationship with his wife and daughter. Oliver’s struggles to come to terms with his sexuality, and his subsequent feelings of guilt are beautifully rendered by Avery, as is the evocation of the British television milieu of the 1970s, calling to mind a host of children’s shows from the era, but in particular works by Oliver Postage and Peter Firmin, including Bagpuss, The Clangers and Pogle’s Wood.

Following the initial success of The Adventures of Imogen and Florian, Oliver, through his relationship with his producer Malcolm Church, is drawn into the orbit of characters loosely based on David Hockney, Kenneth Williams, and perhaps Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton. Avery gives us convincing and affectionate portraits of these actors and artists, showing not only their foibles and petty jealousies, but also their compassion for and loyalty to each other. This sense of empathy permeates the novel, particularly in the rekindling of the relationship between Noah and Imogen, both now middle-aged, the former separated from his wife, the latter caring for a husband suffering from Alzheimer’s. Their faltering efforts to reconnect with each other mirror Oliver’s tentative and ultimately doomed attempts to reconcile with his family. And always there beneath the narrative surface, is the question of PoppyHarp, ostensibly a failed television play created by Oliver and Malcolm, but at its heart, a work much more suggestive of the magical and restorative power of art.

The breadth of the ideas and themes that Avery touches upon in fewer than 300 pages is nothing short of astonishing: the dark side of fame and celebrity, the mysterious power of the creative urge, the pervasive fear engendered by the Cold War, the dreadful physical and social toll of AIDS, the extent to which Britain has been reshaped by social and political forces to become, as the novel suggests, a more compassionate and tolerant society. PoppyHarp is a sensitive and singular work that more than fulfils the promise of Avery’s shorter fiction.

About the reviewer
Mike O’Driscoll is a writer living in Swansea. His work has appeared in Black Static, Interzone, the Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, and numerous anthologies. His story ‘Sounds Like’ was adapted for a TV movie by Brad Anderson, as part of the Masters of Horror series. Mike blogs on different aspects of genre writing and film here. 

Review by Kim Wiltshire of "The University of Bliss" by Julian Stannard

The University of Bliss is a dystopian campus novel set ten years in the future and we join this terrifying new world just as new Vice-Chancellor Gladys Nirvana is about to take up her position at The University of Bliss, or UOB (pronounced YOB) as it is known to its students.

In the political climate of 2035, any academic endeavour is strongly discouraged, with the one poor scholar who managed to publish a book being demoted to Head Trolley Pusher on the university’s very own train. As the management seek higher salaries, fewer pesky academics and more bureaucracy, can the last of the humanities lecturers save higher education from itself? Focussing on Harry Blink, the poor poet who hasn’t published any poetry in years, we meet a range of Deans, Pro-Vice Chancellors and Professors whose sole aim is to disassociate higher education from any notion of learning, instead rewarding those lecturers who spend time on their Lego creativity and awaiting the visit of the Weeping Aubergine / Eggplant from the Light of Idaho. Sounds both surreal and scary? Well, it is. 

I managed to read this book in one day, which is a good thing, and at times it made me laugh out loud and other times nod in sad recognition. Yes, it is a bit broad at times perhaps, and certainly you can feel the author’s frustration with the current higher education climate, but anyone working in the Humanities will recognise the tropes that this novel satirises, such as compulsory attendance at events during Staff Wellbeing Weeks instead of doing any research, 87% of students receiving first class honours degrees and the Creative Writing programmes being viewed with deep suspicion and loathing by those in charge. 

Stannard uses to great effect the dystopian device of keeping the near future near enough for us to recognise many of the directives and initiatives but extrapolating them just far enough for the reader to think: yes, actually, that could well happen. We only have to consider the changes the last decade has seen in higher education, the way league table position and awards are trumpeted at open days whilst redundancy policies are rife, leaving a shrivelled team of lecturers to work forty or fifty hours a week to keep up. And, heaven forfend, should there be a fall in the league table, a fall in the NSS, a fall in the REF, the blame is placed firmly back at those same lecturers’ doors – why aren’t they doing more in terms of outreach, pedagogy, knowledge exchange, public visibility, reflection? The move towards obsessions over lanyards and a consideration of whether robotic dogs might do a better (and of course cheaper) job of teaching students than actual people doesn’t actually seem so ridiculous.

But I would stress that this is not just a book for those working in humanities in HEIs across the UK, this doesn’t just speak to that handful of Creative Writing academics who get asked ‘Yes, but what are you employability statisitics like?’ It is for anyone who values education, who values culture, who considers the world their children or grandchildren are going to inherit in terms of learning, philosophy, literature and art. It is a highly readable novel, biting, funny and fast paced, but at the same time, do take a pause every now and then to consider the world Stannard is creating – how close do you think we’re getting to that now?

About the reviewer
Kim Wiltshire is a writer and academic, Reader and Programme Leader for Creative Writing at Edge Hill University. She writes scripts, short stories and was a British Academy Innovation Fellowship researching ways of embedding arts into healthcare settings during 2022 and 2023. 

Review by Jonathan Taylor of "The Moon Looks on Them All: Of Friends and Friendship" by John Lucas

Despite their reputation for egocentrism, memoirs are often – perhaps always – about relationships between a narrator and other people. As critics Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson point out, “there is a relational aspect to most life writing," and many others have claimed something similar. This “relationality” (as they call it) most commonly encompasses fathers, mothers, siblings, children; but there is a growing sub-genre of memoirs and personal essays which recognises the vital role played by friends in our lives. John Lucas’s fascinating and wide-ranging The Moon Looks on Them All is a significant and beautifully-written contribution to this sub-genre of friendship-memoirs (filikigraphy?). 

Like all the best books about friendship, what Lucas’s memoir recognises is that “relationality” does not simply mean that the story is about two (or three, or fifteen) people rather than one. No: "relationality" means that the relationships themselves become focal points, main characters, above and beyond the individuals involved. Friendships are themselves stories: friendships have narrative arcs of many different kinds, and each of the chapters in Lucas’s book is, first and foremost, a story of a key friendship in the author’s life. Of course we find out about the amazing individuals involved – poets, academics, jazz musicians, E. M. Forster, Brian Clough, Lucas’s cat – but above and beyond that, we follow the story of Lucas’s changing relationships with them over time.

The result is a life-affirming patchwork of interweaving friendships, voices, anecdotes, poems and brilliantly-drawn character portraits. At one point, Lucas admits that “sooner or later, everyone I meet, and get to know, will remind me of a character in Dickens” - and The Moon Looks on Them All is rather like a Dickens novel, teeming with memorable characters. If the cumulative effect of a Dickens novel is often that the reader feels immersed in a vibrant all-encompassing community, something similar might be said, on a microcosmic scale, of the community of friends in Lucas’s memoir. He cites E. M. Forster’s faith in “Love, the beloved Republic,” in “an aristocracy of the sensitive, the considerate, and the plucky” – and that seems to me as good a description as any of the utopian community of friends which Lucas depicts in this book. 

About the reviewer
Jonathan Taylor is an author, editor, lecturer and critic. His two most recent books are the memoir A Physical Education: On Bullying, Discipline & Other Lessons (Goldsmiths, 2024), and the short story collection Scablands and Other Stories (Salt, 2023). He directs the MA in Creative Writing at the University of Leicester. 

Review by Jonathan Wilkins of "Lie of the Land" by Kerry Hadley-Pryce

The Black Country. Dark, foreboding  gloom-ridden. Lie of the Land is exactly the same: dark, foreboding with an aura of gloom and added tension as our main protagonist, Jemma, is faced with ever-increasing anxiety as she makes major life changes that have unforeseen consequences for herself and those around her. She had what seemed the perfect life but after what she thought would be a one night stand she is sucked into a relationship which has tragic consequences and tilts her balanced lifestyle. 

After an incredibly short relationship and against all her own misgivings, Jemma moves with Rory into a dilapidated house with ‘prospects’ so she is told, and endures a shocking nightmare event which the end of the novel contends with. The event is so unbelievable that it tilts her world from its axis as she faces life-changing dramas as she is pulled from normality into a world and life not of her choosing. There are so many strands to this novel. Does Jemma fall for Catherine her neighbour? What will happen to Rory as he is seduced into the orbit of Ed her husband? What happened to Amber, is it all a dream? Will Kaitlin prove to be a friend and to whom, Jemma or Rory? Just what happened to the missing child? Who or what is the lie of the land? Will Rory’s former fiancée Sophie ever recover? Exactly why did Jemma visit her in hospital? She doesn’t seem to be one who is clouded by guilt, but the nervous tension of her relationship with Rory and her ambivalent feelings towards him seem to push her into situations that she does not want to be involved in. She is yanked, almost kicking and screaming, into a world that is everything she doesn’t want and cannot escape. Is this the lie of the land, the bleak and threatening Black Country fugue?

All these questions remain unanswered. We are kept thinking, we are involved in the story and need to make a commitment to it. Throughout the tension that builds up is tangible. We feel every emotion alongside Jemma and care about her which is no small thing as she started off as quite an unattractive character. Hadley-Pryce writes and describes her world with consummate ease as she draws us into a nightmarish domain where reality and threat merge and Jemma cannot see what is real and what is illusory. Just what is it that wakes her at night? Who or what is making the sounds that invade her mind? What is the unseen threat to her happiness? Does her guilt shape her world, her truth? This is a fine example of a story with so many layers and themes, that we are compelled to read on - a story of a woman whose mind is teetering on the edge of fracture, a story that leaves us wanting more.

About the reviewer

Jonathan Wilkins is 69. He is married to the gorgeous Annie with two wonderful sons. He was a teacher for twenty years, a Waterstones’ bookseller and coached women’s basketball for over thirty years before taking up writing seriously. Nowadays he takes notes for students with Special Needs at Leicester and Warwick Universities. He has had a work commissioned by the UK Arts Council and several pieces published traditionally as well as on-line. He has had poems in magazines and anthologies, art galleries, studios, museums and at Huddersfield Railway Station. He loves writing poetry. For his MA, he wrote a crime novel, Utrecht Snow. He followed it up with Utrecht Rain, and is now writing a third part. He is currently writing a crime series, Poppy Knows Best, set at the end of the Great War and into the early 1920s.

You can read more about Lie of the Land by Kerry Hadley-Pryce on Creative Writing at Leicester here.