Supernatural Tales

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Blood Wood is a substantial collection of longer stories and novellas by Christopher Harman, a former librarian who lives in Preston, Lancashire. He’s been writing for decades now, but this is only the second collection of his work – the first being The Heaven Tree in 2017 (also from Sarob Press). Surprising? Perhaps. Harman’s work is relatively low-key and makes demands on the reader thanks to his intense, borderline hallucinatory style. Nobody ever just drinks a cup of tea in a Harman story. There is symbolism in every chipped cup, every soggy teabag. These require immersion, acceptance, and a willingness to sink into the world of seemingly commonplace events that soon acquire disturbing and eventually terrifying implications. Thus in the first story, ‘The Children’, a man with a regular office job moves to a location to cut his commute time. This is as banal as you can get, but from the start you get the sense that things are not quite right with the area. The walk from the new hou...