Phengaris by Anna Orridge

I would like to thank Nefarious Bat Press for a copy of this novella in exchange for a fair and honest review

Publisher – Nefarious Bat Press

Published – Out Now

Price – £7.99 paperback £2.99 ebook

There's something very wrong in Thurstrop Wood.

Mark Warner never noticed it before. He's there to get away from his life, his ailing mother. Out of his head. Not to think about anything.

Birds sing in the wood. But their rhythms seem wrong somehow. Insects crawl and nest, but not where you'd expect them to.

Something in Thurstrop Wood has noticed him. And now it's seen him - it doesn't want to let him go...

Death by its finality has a huge impact on how we re-appraise the times that we have had with someone. The tragedy of never seeing a loved one again is immense but also changes how we start to see those experiences. There are sometimes much more complex and nuanced relationships that now are being severed and how we feel about that is often difficult to process. The conversations we meant to have but never got around to; the secrets we have never really shared or the resolutions we always wanted to finally make are now out of our hands. In Anna Orridge’s very enjoyable horror novella Phengaris we watch a young man swept into a family mystery while also perhaps not fully aware how much grief is part of what is driving him.

Mark is a teenage boy who has often relished getting into trouble particularly as his mother was the school headmistress, pursuing the wrong men and women for romance and always looking for a really good way to get high. Now life is being dominated by his mother being in the very last few weeks of her life due to stage four liver cancer. A woman for whom Mark finds very little happy in his memories that are mixed with many arguments and her own secret alcoholism. A trip to nearby Thurstrop Wood to try the latest drugs that Mark is also using to keep his mother out of immense pain though ends in a very strange location filled with mysterious metalwork, a strange sound and huge ants the like of which he has never seen before. This sets in motion a chain of strange events. Linking Mark to a notorious death in the 1970s, the mystery of his father’s disappearance and the continued sightings of insects that should not exist.

There was a lot I enjoyed about this fascinating weird slice of horror and up front is the relationships Orridge creates. This is not a tale of grief leading to soulful tearjerking reconciliation or perhaps people turning over new leaves. Orridge instead has much messier and very flawed human characters interacting with the key but interesting choice that Mark’s mother is now no longer to talk herself. We just then get Mark and other’s impressions of this woman. Mark is definitely not perfect but we start to see how his experience of growing up, being seemingly abandoned by his father and resented by his mother has led him to lash out but also he was still drawn into being a nearly full-time carer. Hiding his bisexuality and nursing these resentments we see perhaps why he’s on what seems initially a quite selfish path, but he is capable of kindness and thought. By the end of the tale we may not want to be his best friend but I like the way we come around to understanding him.

The story has a fascinating mix of the feel of folk horror and something much weirder. This comes across in a stranger very likely murder that happened on the property Mark visited but in the time of the 70s and with enigmatic woman at the centre who was a mix of drug dealer, occultist and who knows what else. The strange insects we meet are lovingly and creepily described and there is throughout a sense of gathering strangeness to the various lifeforms we meet that really move with the finale into true body horror and the sense of something is not quite right now getting much worse.

The one issue I did have though was after a good level of set up and family revelations the real finale just feel incredibly rushed. Though I liked the plan we find Mark had to resolve things there for me was a lack of a hood antagonist but there is a lack of real motivation beyond a villain’s quick exposition and the ‘clear the decks’ ending for me felt like it didn’t really fit the wider story. A few more chapters to play out these confrontations and the choices made I feel would have made this a much stronger ending and that slightly weakened my enjoyment of the tale.

For those who enjoy the weirder side of horror I do think Phengaris has a lot to recommend itself for. A speedy and engrossing read with a great sense of character work that I really appreciated. Orridge is a very interesting writer of tales and this is very much worth a look.