Folk Horror Harvest: Hellebore On Malefice and Scarfolk’s Map

The nights are drawing in, and whilst Halloween is over it still feels a bit like folk horror season. A good time, then, to take a look at the third issue of Hellebore, the rather good folk horror magazine which I’ve previously reviewed the first and second issues of.

The issue leads off with Lucifer Over Lancashire, a consideration by Catherine Spooner of the Pendle Witches case and its cultural impact. This is a terse introduction to the subject matter which is bigger on the cultural impact aspects than the facts of the case, and plays into the editorial by editor Maria J. Pérez Cuervo about how witches and witchcraft can be icons of resistance – the idea of women with spiritual powers that can have effective, status quo-upsetting powers in everyday life, rather than their spirituality being essentially focused around deferred postmortem rewards, being subversive to the status quo even if those accused in the past were wholly innocent of the accusations against them. (Notably, the issue is dedicated to “the thousands who were tortured, imprisoned, and killed during witch-hunts”, rather than making the less supportable claim that any proportion of those people were actually witches in the sense that the authorities were accusing them of being.)

Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos and Its Imitators, Part 4

This article was originally published on Ferretbrain. I’ve backdated it to its original Ferretbrain publication date but it may have been edited and amended since its original appearance.

The story so far: August Derleth’s put out the original Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos anthology through his Arkham House publishing imprint, and after he died the original Tales was revised by Jim Turner. Arkham House attempted to follow it up first with New Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos, edited by Ramsey Campbell, which was a bit hit-and-miss, and the rather more successful Jim Turner-edited Cthulhu 2000.

However, Arkham House’s star was well and truly fading by the 1990s, despite these Mythos-related efforts and others (such as the issuing of new editions of Lovecraft’s works with the texts corrected by S.T. Joshi). With the death of August Derleth and the copyright on Lovecraft’s work coming closer to lapsing worldwide, the fandom was less inclined to look to the publisher as being the be-all and end-all of the Mythos; the backlash against Derleth’s heavy-handed pronouncements of canon gathered pace, and new sources of Lovecraftian writing and criticism appeared here and there. In addition, Jim Turner’s personal take on the Mythos and his lauding of high literary value and science fiction-oriented works over pastiche earned its own backlash.

Against this background, a new publisher arose – Fedogan & Bremer. This small press aimed to produce books more oriented towards the old style of Arkham House, before Turner’s custodianship took the publisher on a different path from the one it had taken under August Derleth. (This was not an overly adversarial situation, though – they saw their books distributed via Arkham House, for one thing.) Like Arkham House, some of their material has disappeared into the aether whilst others have been reprinted as trade paperbacks by other publishers – with a few even making it into Ballantine’s line of Lovecraftian releases, putting them on the same level as their issues of Arkham House material.

Among the more prominent Fedogan & Bremer releases are a number of anthologies edited by Robert M. Price, who at this point had established himself as a loud voice in Cthulhu fandom. Up to this point, Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos had tended to represent an unattainable high point in the ranks of Mythos anthologies; Price tilted directly at this windmill..