Now, it might not have escaped your notice that as Horror goes I quite like a bit of what is loosely termed ‘Folk Horror’ – that is to say grim stuff, based on ancient stories and legends, or where history tells us that things from the past can affect the present. Ancient artifacts, old documents, creepy monuments, all combined with old wives’ tales and superstition. “You’d best not go in those woods… horrible things happen there!” – that sort of stuff.
This isn’t quite that. In fact, set mainly in the city of Birmingham, England, it’s more urban horror than folk – although there are elements that link to those folk stories in History.
The story centres around Rachel Cooper. Married to Tom, together they’re a late-twenties- early thirties, middle-class kind of couple, with all of the opportunities and challenges that life brings. No children yet but steady jobs, looking towards buying a house and settling down – the usual sort of thing.
The story begins in earnest when Rachel has a canal boat accident on holiday. Her left arm is smashed between two boats, which leads to the lower portion of the arm being amputated. She spends time recuperating in hospital, adjusting to life when only having one hand. To her shock, Rachel finds that she can still feel sensations in her left limb as if the hand and fingers are still there.
On her return home she begins to have nightmares about three seemingly different women. All seem to be connected to the local legend of “Oak Mary” but are from different times. Annabel Clayton is a Romani woman living in the Birmingham area in the Second World War who is murdered by her husband during an air raid. Eline Lambert is a Nazi double agent working in Birmingham in WW2 sending back false information to the Germans and passing on details to British intelligence. The third, Daphne Massey, is a factory girl who makes her way by supplementing her income as a prostitute. All of the characters seem to be connected to a particular place – an old oak tree where once a body was found inside the tree’s hollow.
The issue is then why Rachel is getting these dreams, and what her connection is to the Oak Mary legend. When she begins to have hallucinations of the real modern world overlain with images of the old, her family believe that the trauma of her accident has led to some sort of mental breakdown. What it actually is is called The Umbra, a parallel world overlaying the here and now where some spirits still live on. From there appear three Deaths, the causes of Annabel, Eline and Daphne’s demises, who appear in the real world determined to kill them.
But it is weirder than that. In the last part of the book, Rachel has developed the Sight, which allows her to travel between and communicate with the everyday land of the living and the almost-parallel world of the dead…
It is a little sobering to find that James has used elements of real folklore to create this entertaining story. Some of the rather odd parts of the story are based on real events. “Oak Mary”, for example, is based upon the Birmingham story of “Bella in the Wych Elm”, where a body was found inside a tree. Though various theories have been suggested as for the reason (ancient sacrifice, ritual or gangland killing, hidden murder) the case is still unsolved today. James does well to use these details as a basis for a story that is a little more than that.
Overall, the story is entertainingly written, and the modern setting is nicely counterbalanced between that and the world of 1940s Birmingham. The characters are a little generic, but they are of such a nature that little more than the basic outline is required. This tale is more about the strange places the characters go to, and the world of The Umbra is both inspired and creepy, although who we meet are usually either sad or pleasant. There’s a nice ending which ties most things up and leaves open the possibility of further stories based around Rachel and her family.
The Hollow Tree is a great page turner. It’s nicely chilling, a little nasty in places, but nothing that a murder mystery reader would blanche at. Definitely not for minors, mind!
The Hollow Tree by James Brogden
Published by Titan Books Jun 2019
330 pages
ISBN: 978-1785654404
Review by Mark Yon
