Loudhe Sing Cuccoo: Folk Horror and Water Shall Refuse Them
Why, in recent years, have so many been tempted to try their hand at this hitherto obscure aesthetic? Because the awkwardness of our relationship to nature has never been so acutely felt as during climate crisis. Today, it is more obvious than ever that we are: on the one hand, a part of nature, organic organisms dependent on the Earth for the continued existence of our species; on the other, apart from nature, divided from it by our societies’ reckless and destructive uses of the Earth’s resources.
Oscar Mardell on folk horror and Lucie McKnight Hardy‘s Water Shall Refuse Them.
Missives from a Parallel Dimension
Despite her reliance on medical institutions to save her from suicide or out-of-control addiction at the most desperate times of her life, her view of these environments was understandably jaundiced. Her chosen isolation as a writer meant that the physical world in which she lived bore some resemblance to the one that the rest of the human race inhabits; but it became hallucinatory and nightmarish as the doors of perception distorted. These extremes of experience she captures in her chilling and precise prose, often tempered with a wry black humour.
Des Barry reviews Machines in the Head by Anna Kavan.