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A very good collection of stories set in rustic locations around the UK. Like Cox's recent novel Villager, all these tales combine a fascination for the mythology and memories lurking in the landscape with a snappy, no-nonsense modern voice that often has a lot of humour. The novella "Help The Witch" charts the journey of a man who's made a dramatic move to a rugged, isolated part of the country, and what he finds in the shabby house he rents from a lurking landlord. The theme of who "own" the countryside is very present here, and there's a lot of anger bubbling away but without being allowed to spill over, and the ending provides a lot of hope.

Many of the stories are piecemeal affairs, patchworks of the experiences of dozens of different people from all strata of society, from rich yuppies in their summer homes to the rural unemployed, though people tend not to stay in their place in Cox's fiction and the numerous witches, of course, do largely as they please, even though their actions are not always devoid of consequence.

Another story I loved was "Seance", a monologue by a not particularly popular medium, which is very funny, and the section of "Folk Tales of the Twenty-Third Century" given over to savaging the sex offender and occasional comedian Russell Brand (at the time of publishing Brand had yet to be outed for his crimes in a TV documentary, but Cox was once a London journalist who probably had access to other sources of information.) Cox's style is incisive, sometimes even irascible, and full of movement, and he has a knack for depicting the peculiar experiences the woods and fields are able to inspire in a way that makes them seem real without compromising their often nebulous quality. These stories cut a dash through the crowd of lesser "folk horror" writers and provide a great snapshot of the myriad ways people interact with lonely places. Also a great design and some lovely illustrations from Cox's mother Jo.

This was a disappointment coming after The Ballad of Black Tom, which I enjoyed a lot. This novel needs a proper edit - about a third should be trimmed off - and overall it's just a very average mainstream horror novel of the kind that's been churned out in vast numbers since the 70s. There are also some very annoying tropes, such as lazy national stereotyping in lieu of character building and repeatedly referring to characters by their full family names (even though the novel is about family, there's still too much of it), wannabe-cute anecdotes about baby shit, and the Feisty Female Librarian character who seems to appear in about 50% of fantasy nowadays, as if readers didn't know that libraries and the people who run them are a good thing. I'm getting really tired of this books-are-wonderful circle jerk.

But for me the defect that really screws this novel - apart from its excessive length - is the poor sense of place. LaValle is dealing with portals to other worlds, and this is technically an urban fantasy, but he can't seem to conceive of a portal that's actually urban in appearance. Instead, the action unfolds across all sorts of contrived countryside-within-the-city venues: overlooked river islands, those big wooded parks town dwellers are encouraged to consider as akin to real forest, and so on. And LaValle's descriptions of the various parts of New York are so stilted! All these paragraphs that read like extracts from uninspired tourist brochures.

The good points of the novel are the gallows humour, which doesn't always misfire, and some set pieces with a proper weird vibe. There are times where the talent LaValle displayed in Black Tom is still discernible, which is what makes all the surrounding piffle so tiresome. I also enjoyed reading about the main character Apollo's experience as a book dealer (they don't get anywhere near as much attention as librarians in fiction, plus my dad was also a "bookman"), and no doubt there are people around who will benefit from reading about the sanity-eroding degree of police harrassment faced by black people whenever they do anything even vaguely unconventional in a public place. Finally I appreciated the way Lavalle avoided the usual British and Irish mythology you find endlessly served up in novels about this particular subject, and at least tried to take things somewhere a bit more fresh.

Another sound entry in the series, though the first half isn't great. With the exception of a cringey Nice White Lady attempt at indigenous fantasy (Mary Robinette Kowal's "At The Edge of Dying", which is made even more tiresome by its mockery of "effete" men who wear fancy costumes in broad daylight, OMG how could they?) none of these stories are bad, they're just not very memorable - and there seemed to be a bit less variety of setting this time around. I started to get a bit fed up of all those vaguely Arabian Nightsy settings. But then I'm not a fan of fantasy worlds which are just real countries in thin disguise. I don't see the point in that, unless it's for diplomacy purposes I guess. Still, one of these stories, "Hooves and the Hovel of Abdel Jameela" by Saladin Ahmed, is great, pleasantly whimsical and romantic but dark enough to compel, and I loved the Pipes-of-Pan-at-Joujouka vibe, that blending of Arabic and Greco-Roman myth.

Things get a lot better in the second half, too, and there are some decent dark fantasy and horror numbers. I'd read "each thing I show you is a piece of my death" by Gemma Files and Stephen J Barringer before, but I think this was the first anthology to feature it? At any rate, this cracking collage of audiovisual threats (which are enhanced by reproduction rather than faded), deserves multiple reads and loses little of its impact. Unmissable for lovers of epistolary and found-footage horror narratives.

Catherynne M Valente's imaginative fairy tale-inflected jigsaw "The Secret History of Mirrors", Tanith Lee's high-coloured reverie "The Pain of Glass" and Kelley Barnhill's "Open the Door and the Light Pours Through" also provide elegant darkness (the Barnhill story is quite Nina Allan), and although this is not officially a themed anthology, the second half is dominated by the themes of light, glass, windows, mirrors, transparency in general, and the accompanying reflections and imagery of the self. I love all that stuff so it was a pleasant surprise!

This is quite unlike French's later books, and owes more to the Barbara Vine school of crime novel, with its emphasis on family history, the layers of experience that make up a self and the unreliability of memory. It's not as good as Vine by any means, with a huge number of characters you just don't get a chance to care about, and some very unappetizing descriptions of food (though the heroine seems to know her way around an afterwork drink!) The posh English families at the novel's heart never really come to life, which is a disaster for this kind of novel, though the heroine felt real to me, and not too perfect. There is no point at which this book becomes thrilling, and I'm afraid what might have been its main selling-point at the time, the recovered memory scandal, is now so far in the rear-view mirror that it feels a bit stale, though I still thought the sessions between the heroine and her psych were the most interesting part of the novel. Some of the sexual politics have aged far worse, with some off-the-cuff remarks made about underage sex sounding really shocking to modern ears. Ultimately I wouldn't recommend anyone go out of their way to acquire this book, though it kept me reading to the end.