That Which Stands Outside

What makes a good folk horror story? It is not just the tension and gruesome moments, but the feeling. You need to get the tone right. A visitor to a new place that is familiar in some ways, but alien in others. You can experience some of this unease yourself just by travelling to somewhere abroad off the beaten path. Local customs are simply different from your own. This may be as simple as a slightly different Full English/Welsh/Scottish/Irish breakfast, to as complex as burning the local bobby in a wicker cage. Mark Morris captures the otherness of a distant island community in That Which Stands Outside with its eccentric local humans, and even more eccentric other things. 

Meeting Yrsa felt like fate. When walking home Todd saw Yrsa being mugged and he stepped into help, by stepping into a fist and then stepping into a hospital bed. This meet-hurt starts a whirlwind romance. Todd is drawn to Yrsa’s wry outlook on life having travelled from a small Nordic Island community to London. When her mother dies Todd travels with his partner back to her home to help but starts to regret it when the locals come out, and not just the local humans. 

Which is a nice blend of two styles of horror that I enjoy; folk and body. The first half is a classic folk horror story as Todd travels to a strange island with its unique customs. The tension builds as strange events start to occur. The locals do not trust Yrsa or Todd, and they do not trust the locals to tell them what is happening. Are the locals implicit in all the strangeness? 

The first act is at a slower pace and lets you get to know the characters. The point of view is predominantly Todd’s, and you see him sink further in love with Yrsa. Yrsa has a strange vibe about her from the off, is this just cultural differences, or something more disturbing? Morris has great fun playing with this idea, teasing both Todd and the reader.  

More is revealed in the second act of the book as we move into a more horrific form of horror. I was wondering who was going to get killed when there were so few characters, so when a shipload of people are introduced, the book begins to shift. Now the book takes on a classic 70/80s horror vibe. Small vignettes of horrific moments that reminded me of The Rats. There are some disturbing moments towards the end of the book. Morris is an unforgiving author and gives horror fans what they want – whether they like it or not. 

The shift from folk to body horror works because Morris writes both with confidence. Not all fans of the genre like both styles of horror, but you cannot deny they are well written here. I enjoyed both aspects of the book. The spooky beginning and the unsettling ending. The best body horror should have you recoiling and feeling sorry for the characters, I felt all these things in the concluding section the book, it felt so bleak at times, but that is the genre that I chose to love. Which provides the perfect feeling that you should get from a horror story, the bonus being that you get to enjoy some tense folk horror and then move onto the gory stuff.