Katy Soar’s persuasive introduction to Circle of Stones made me pick up a collection of stories exploring the native (wraith-like) stones that cover the British Isles. They are rich objects for human sacrifice, devil worship, pantheistic cults and magic. Stones are ambiguous and mysterious.
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And once they’re set in a circle are rife for Druid intervention and imaginative writing. It’s then a pity to report that Circles of Stone doesn’t deliver sufficient thrills, excitement or plain horror. Soar’s line up of writers includes such great horror practitioners as Algernon Blackwood, Arthur Machen and E.F. Benson but they, with some modern writers and forgotten early 20th century authors, are not at their best. None of the stories is bad. It’s just that given these are weird tales they are often a bit too literal, even prosaic and underwhelming.
Perhaps cinema has covered this pagan territory so much that words feel redundant, limping to catch up with strident images. Films like The Night of the Demon, The Wicker Man, The Witches and Midsommar have trespassed, for good or ill, too much on what we’ve read of place and ritual so that it’s harder to be thrilled by this kind of tale. And there’s a tendency in this British Library collection for characters to fall into clichés – talking of dark things we shouldn’t meddle with; not wanting to go to that site on a winter’s night or he /she having vanished from the face of the earth.
There are fifteen stories. Their ordering does give a sound and careful exposition of numerous strange ideas surrounding stones, burial sites and ancient practices that impinge on contemporary life. And Katy Soar has logically laid out an anthology according to her theme of magical beliefs. Yet only four stories really gripped me: 'The Tarn of Sacrifice' by Algernon Blackwood, 'Lisheen' by Frederick Cowles, 'Minuke' by Nigel Kneale and 'Where the Stones Grow' by Lisa Tuttle.
Sexual obsession causing Christianity to be replaced by satanic worship; to be caught in a trance where you believe a young woman was once your lover in an Ancient Roman past; poltergeists wrecking a new house built on an ancient sacrificial site and the terror of a stone to move about freely and attack you. Here I felt the writers’ supernatural intent was secure, confident and free of the obvious.
You may prefer other stories over mine. But don’t expect a consistency of intense chills from every author. Circles of Stone is inconsistent in quality but at least the book has a wonderfully designed cover by Mauricio Villamayor from a terrific illustration by Sandra Gomez. If only more stories had lived up to the striking packaging.
- Alan Price
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