When we go the cinema for the latest slasher, when we pick up that paperback from hell on a dusty, shadowy shelf, when we walk home, at the witching hour, and the roads exhale their held breath as we put on that spooky podcast, we keep ourselves straight-backed and assured, assured that, if we jump at a scream, at an imagined hand reaching beyond an unseen wall, we are protected, protected by the very unreality of these items, the horrors trapped on a page, on a screen, in the vibrating air thudding your eardrums. 

Erik McHatton’s Straw World affords you no such luxury.

From the opening story, McHatton ensnares you in metatextual unease with its starting story, ‘Straw World,’ which serves as a frame narrative for the collection. The story’s structure replicates the collection’s: starting with the Blue House, the Red House, the Yellow House, and the Black House. The recursive act of titling the sections after the sections in the story, draws those entrapping parallels that all horror loves. The Blue House is the ‘happy home’, and so it’s only fitting that the collection opens with stories teasing the reader about just that: the happy home—and the unachievable fantasy of it. The house is the strange barrier  between the known and unknown in ‘Knocks’, or a decaying reminder of grief and emptiness in ‘Little Dirt Boy’, or unpeopled and uncared for, in the quiet, dusty melancholy of absent lives and emotionally starved peoples in ‘The Success of Dover’s Glen’. 

By the time we get to the next section, The Red House, McHatton has begun to investigate another conundrum, for if being trapped is awful, is it better to exist in hurt, or be nothing? ‘Station 42’ (the answer to life, the universe, and everything), is half-treatise and half-story (as per the Ligottian tradition), wherein a man with a TV for a head leaves a television on a disturbed man’s porch, the titular channel tuning only to  puppet-lead lectures about existence, pain, and purpose. ‘Timmy Thomerson’s Turn’, so autumnal that Bradbury’s ghost seems to ooze from the page, is a parent’s nightmare— the torment of tragically lost children haunts the piece, an uneasy reminder that every one we bring to life—of matter or imagination—suffers. ‘The Face Dealer,’ and ‘The Last Case of Dr Jonah Wexley Abbott’ doubly return us to an older Weird with Poe-like fantasias on the decisions we make, and crooked Faustian deals that prey on our vulnerabilities. By now this sense of unease at being forced through the exhibition maps out to being dragged into the collection. Am I reading this for my own pleasure? If so, the guide of Straw World appears in mirrors, in locked phone screen reflections, in casted shadows on your bedroom door. He reminds me that every horror I read I create. My confinement is the same as the plight of these narratives.  

And so I go on, in the final sections, The Yellow House and The Black, ‘On The Night Bus’, ‘Where We Are…’, and ‘In Carnality’ take the culpability of the reader and pluralise it. We are moved by forces outside our ken. Why do we anxiously push through our worst nightmare? Why do we keep reading? Why do we deal with the outrageous nonsense of fever dreams, on and on—why, like bags of meat, do we propel forwards, unerringly, so full of need and want? 

McHatton asks us these questions—and more—again and again, with narrators thrown to tempests for our entertainment: and yet, for our own horror too. We might vicariously enjoy the fear of a character, but we bear responsibility for the hurt we feel for others, because we are part of the joke. When we arrive to The Black, ‘Demodorum’ presents us with a new revelation:  whatever we did, whether we stopped reading at this review, whether we carried on and bought and read the book, whatever, whenever, however we do anything, was always part of a greater design than that of us. We had no choice, really—it was always leading here. 

It’s a book I’ll treasure for a long time. And I like to think it’s fiction. That it sits on my shelf constrained to some speculative night. Still, I can’t help but keep on asking: Did McHatton pen this? Or did something move through him, and now through me—and maybe through you—to unfurl in our heads, to grow into our nerves, into my street as houses turn blue, red, yellow, then black. If it’s all fiction, then I have to ask what else is, because I’m still there, searching for McHatton, for the Artist, in a world of straw. And I know for a fact, that they would want you to come too. 

Straw World and Other Echoes from the Void is due for publication 4th September – you can pre-order your copy on Amazon.co.uk