I’m starting the new reading year with a recommendation for The Crow Folk (2021) by Mark Stay, a story I’d classify as Horror with humour and heart. This is the first book in The Witches of Woodville, a series set in a far from ordinary English village during World War II. Four volumes have been published so far (The Crow Folk, Babes in the Wood, The Ghost of Ivy Barn, The Holly King), with a fifth one (The Corn Bride) due out in March. The series follows the adventures of a young woman called Faye Bright who has inherited considerable magical powers from her late mother. All four volumes are easily available in paperback or as ebooks.

Faye Bright lives in the Kentish village of Woodville with her father Terrence who runs a pub called The Green Man. It is 1940 and the war against Nazi Germany isn’t going well for Britain. Most of the young men have been called up to fight, with a few exceptions such as Faye’s friend Bertie Butterworth, who isn’t considered fit for active service. Jobs in the village and the surrounding farms have to be done by women or the elderly and nearly everyone has volunteered for some kind of war work. Faye and Bertie still have bell-ringing practise to look forward to but when they arrive at the village church, they are told that bell-ringing has now been banned for the duration of the war. The government isn’t aware that there is more to church bells than making a joyful noise. The ban is particularly annoying to Faye because she has just discovered a new ringing method invented by her late mother, Kathryn Winter. This was tucked inside a handwritten book of Rituals and Magic apparently intended for Faye when the time is right.

Faye hardly remembers her mother but knows that other villagers found her strange. Faye’s father is reluctant to talk about what the Book of Spells might mean but he does admit that Kathryn was a friend of the one woman in the village whom everyone is sure is a witch – ageless, white-haired, pipe-smoking, Charlotte Southill. When unpopular villager, Archie Craddock, goes missing after an altercation with Miss Charlotte in The Green Man, only Faye seems concerned. That is partly because Miss Charlotte and her fellow witch, recent widow Philomena Teach, have worse things to worry about. Miss Charlotte suspects that grief-stricken Mrs Teach may have accidentally summoned something from Below, while trying to communicate with her late husband.

Strange things have begun to happen in Woodville including all the scarecrows disappearing from the fields. When Craddock overhears voices planning to seize the village he blunders into a sinister group of animated scarecrows. Their dominating leader, Pumpkinhead, demands that Craddock tell him where to find the village witches. Craddock manages to escape the scarecrows by setting fire to one of them. The scarecrows, who call themselves the Crow Folk, vow to get their revenge. They plan to march on the village, which stirs up odd memories for some of the scarecrows, particularly a female called Suky.

Meanwhile, Faye is trying to discover if her mother was really a witch but she gets no answers from crotchety Miss Charlotte. When the Crow Folk invade the churchyard, only a few villagers, such as Faye and Mrs Teach, seem able to see them as they really are. The rest think the Crow Folk must be circus folk or gypsies wearing unusually good costumes. Pumpkinhead confronts the villagers and sniffs out the presence of witches, including Faye. He demands that Craddock be brought to them by sunrise the following morning and warns the villagers not to disappoint him. Most people don’t take the threat seriously although they are unnerved when dead birds start falling out of the sky. Faye is worried for Craddock, especially when she has some horrible visions of his fate.

After one of the invading scarecrows is torn to pieces the conflict between the Crow Folk and the villagers intensifies and Miss Charlotte’s worst fears about the true identity of Pumpkinhead are confirmed. Faye begins to feel pity for the souls who have been brought back to animate the scarecrows but they are still a terrible threat to her family and her village. Even joining forces with the two older witches doesn’t seem to be enough to defeat the Crow Folk. The only hope for Woodville may be the magic of Faye’s mother and the forbidden church bells…

Folk Horror is having a bit of a moment, especially in British films. Much of it involves naive outsiders stumbling upon sinister countryside customs and becoming victims of ancient rituals. Such narratives are usually written by members of the urban elite and betray an underlying assumption that country people are backward and superstitious. As someone brought up in the countryside, I resent that. Mark Stay has playfully given his invented village a calendar which includes virtually every known English folk custom, but his stout-hearted villagers are far from stupid or primitive. Woodville may be an old-fashioned place (the vicar is thought rather modern for drinking coffee and reading paperback novels) but most of its inhabitants have no desire to worship unpleasant ancient deities (as a woodland demi-god finds out in Volume 4). The village has its squabbles and minor feuds (no-one can quite remember why the Bell-ringers dislike the Morris Men) but it is not inhabited by the kind of rural psychopaths often encountered in Horror films.

The Witches of Woodville series is Historical Fantasy as much as Folk Horror and the World War II background is very well done. The Crow Folk is set at the stage of the war in which the Battle of Britain is being fought in the skies over Kent and everyone is nervous about German spies and the possibility of imminent invasion. Woodville is shown as coping remarkably well with these fears and with the diverse incomers that war brings, including landgirls, foreign airmen, injured soldiers and Jewish refugees. Stay strikes a good balance between Dad’s Army style humour when he is writing about Bertie’s efforts in the Home Guard or Faye’s night-patrols as an Air-Raid Precautions enforcer, and sudden grim reminders of grief and trauma. Many of the young airmen who cheerfully drink in The Green Man are destined to die on their next mission.

Another feature of The Witches of Woodville which is based on historical research is the Nazi leadership’s obsession with the Occult (see my Fantasy Reads post on Silver Nitrate, February 2024). It is even true that some patriotic British witches offered to use their magic to protect their country during the war. As the series develops, Stay has these opposing magical forces led by a cruel German warlock called Otto Kopp and Vera Fivetrees, the imposing Caribbean High Witch of the British Empire, but young Faye turns out to have powers to rival both of them. Some of these powers, such as flashes of foresight when she touches a person or their possessions, are painful to live with. Others, such as an ability to fly, prove dangerous but enjoyable.

Barmaids aren’t often giving starring roles in Fantasy fiction but Faye is a striking and memorable heroine. Glasses-wearer Faye, is what used to be called a Tomboy. She prefers to dress in dungarees and has no time for boys, having failed to notice that shy Bertie adoes her. Faye is quick tempered, tactless and impatient, faults which often get her into trouble, but she has a generous heart. She, in the modern jargon, takes ownership of problems and acts as the conscience of the village, which doesn’t always make her popular. Sometimes Bertie is her only supporter. Born with one leg shorter than the other, Bertie is frustrated that he cannot do more for the war effort, but his disability is not his defining feature. His kindness and loyalty are more important.

Both Faye and Bertie are around seventeen when the series begins so The Witches of Woodville could have been marketed as Young Adult fiction. It isn’t because Stay also uses older characters as viewpoints. The two village witches who become Faye’s magical mentors – eccentric Miss Charlotte and pompous, sharp-eyed Mrs Teach are initially quite unsympathetic characters. Gradually however the reader is allowed to glimpse some of the secrets and vulnerabilities of their unconventional lives and loves. We also learn about their very female, moon-related magic though, as they caustically point out, the idea that witches like to prance around in the nude is something dreamed up by men. Novels written from the point of view of witches are now quite common. What is more unusual is that Stay also takes us inside the minds and feelings of some of the beings who cause horror and chaos in Woodville, such as an angry ghost, a ferocious Wild Man, a murderous traitor or, in The Crow Folk, an animated scarecrow.

As a child, not even Barbara Euphan Todd’s popular Worzel Gummidge series could persuade me that scarecrows weren’t extremely creepy. So it was easy for Stay to frighten me as his scarecrows, dressed in old clothes stuffed with straw and with random objects for heads, are freed from their crosses by Pumpkinhead. Their grotesque features and the jerky movements of their sinister dances are horribly well described. Initially Suky, with her button eyes and stitched smile, is as disturbing as the others but she is the only one of the Crow Folk to question Pumpkinhead’s plans. He has told them that they are ancient guardian spirits who are entitled to drive out the villagers and take back the land but gentle Suky has fleeting memories that are human. I hadn’t expected to be touched by the longings of the Crow Folk to return home but their time is over and the witches of Woodville must act against them.

There is a poignant element in Stay’s writing which gives more depth than you usually find in Horror fiction but The Crow Folk is also consistently enjoyable. If you are enduring a cold January why not let Stay transport you to high summer in a picturesque English village? Faye’s later adventures, as she copes with a Nazi warlock, ruthless aristocrats, a haunted barn, enemy planes, malign fairies, warring tree-gods and falling in love, could keep you entertained until Spring arrives. Until next month….

Geraldine

January 2025