6 Fantastic Folk Horror Stories to Read This Midsommar

Midsummer is here: a time of year marked by a sudden appearance of thousands of fireflies lighting up the night sky, not to mention the celebration of a host of unusual folk festivals and pagan ceremonies enshrined in the centuries-old lore of numerous towns, cities, and even countries. This Midsummer also brings us Midsommar, the new folk horror film from Ari Aster (Hereditary) about people tripping out and possibly dying horribly at a truly sinister folk festival/pagan ceremony.

“The Lottery“, by Shirley Jackson
Easily the most recognizable, widely read work of folk horror in literature (thanks, middle school English teachers!), Jackson’s story begins in the folksy tone of any other quick pastoral sketch, with a group of recognizable characters getting ready for their annual town ritual involving an old box, a three-legged stool, and a random drawing of slips of paper. But the beauty of the tale lies in what isn’t explained, and all the unanswered questions that are continually raised by the whole affair, soon revealed to be quite sordid indeed. As tension builds and the mood turns from odd suspense to outright horror, the ambiguity is heightened as much by which questions are answered as which ones aren’t, as well as the way people in the town seem to react (or don’t) to the horrifying events at its center. Most chillingly, the prose maintains that laconic and pastoral tone all the way through, even as things take a turn toward murder.

Harvest Home, by Thomas Tryon
Alongside “The Lottery,” Harvest Home is one of the O.G. works of folk horror. Ned Constantine and his family, plagued by the maladies of big-city life, move to the rustic town of Cornwall Coombe, an agrarian community led by the cheerful Widow Fortune. It’s a place out of another time, untouched by the outside world and governed by unusual seasonal rituals. There, almost instantly, the Constantines’ health seems to improve, and certainly the idyllic setting begins to lift their spirits. But as the Coombe starts preparing for its largest festival, the cryptic “Harvest Home,” it becomes clear there’s a definite darkness lurking under the surface, and that maybe the town’s cheerful and benevolent exterior is supported by something very dark indeed. Tryon strikes a great contrast between the lovely pastoralia of the Coombe and the gothic horror lurking beneath the surface, with the gruesome scenes of the unfolding rituals only strengthening the effect. While not be the most terrifying entry on this list, it still delivers chills over forty years after it was first published.

The Hidden People, by Alison Littlewood
Inspired by the horrifying historical fact of instances of people burning so-called “changelings,” Alison Littlewood spins the story of a man named Albie, who becomes obsessed with investigating the death of his cousin Lizzie, burned alive in a rural community after her husband claimed she was replaced by an evil spirit. Worse, the community seems to believe that Lizzie’s husband had the right idea, and that Lizzie was a changeling. Littlewood lets an air of atmospheric gloom creep in slowly, leaving readers in doubt about whether the town’s strange customs are real, or whether Albie is being led astray by his own obsessions and preoccupation with the customs of the modern world. The ominous pacing and twisting plot build suspense, as the tale grows more unsettling with every page.

“The Night Whiskey”, by Jeffrey Ford
Jeffrey Ford has a gift for transforming the pastoral into the bizarre, as evidences in stories like the unsettling folklore museum riff “Word Doll.” One of his standout works in this vein is “The Night Whiskey,” set in the small town of Gatchfield and following Ernest, the town’s apprentice “drunk harvester,” as he gets ready for a ritual where eight people chosen by lottery will drink the mysterious Night Whiskey. The drink has odd properties; its imbibers inexplicably end up passed out in the trees by the next morning. The ritual itself isn’t sinister—while the whiskey is distilled from berries that grow in the skulls of dead animals, it triggers nothing more than a fall into a kind of odd dreamlike state. Rather, the horror springs from how wrong things end up going because of the ritual, with the surreal idyll of Gatchfield darkening into outright supernatural body horror and melancholy, while retaining the odd beauty and weird sense of unreality. Like the best folk horror, this story is disquieting, leaving readers with a lingering feeling of ominous foreboding.

Swansong, by Kerry Andrew
Set in the Scottish highlands and beginning with the image of a man tearing a bird apart with his bare hands, Swansong follows Polly Vaughan, a student escaping her troubles in London by moving into a rustic house in a small community. Taken together, Polly’s fish out of water snark about terrible weather and boring locals and the oddly looming nature of the surrounding wilderness build an odd interplay between the more realistic and psychological difficulties of the character and the unusual events that unfold around her. Polly’s constant attempts to fight off her own guilt also help add to the sense of something sinister encroaching upon her world, and the sense of darkness and surreality only grows stronger as the book continues.

Dark Harvest, by Norman Partridge
Partidge’s “chased through the night” B-movie homage is a less of a slow-burn than most other works of folk horror, but it deserves a place on this list for its weird rituals and “town with a dark secret” tone. Every Halloween, the boys of a small Midwestern hamlet fast for a week, get hopped up on candy, grab whatever weapons are at hand, and are let loose to hunt the October Boy—a knife-wielding, pumpkin-headed scarecrow. The prize for catching him is the chance to finally escape their hometown. Set over the course of one night in 1963, Dark Harvest blends pastoral folk horror with pulpy action as it follows the intersecting lives of the town’s citizens, each hoping to put the Boy down as he completes his own ritual journey towards the local church. While Partridge telegraphs that something is clearly wrong with the town from the jump, he manages to keep the final reveals a surprise, even as each revelation along the way ups the stakes. By the end, a relatively simple chase story becomes a desperate, violent struggle for survival on both a personal and cultural level.

*Interestingly, while the legendary film The Wicker Man isn’t strictly based on a book, it was “inspired” by the 1967 novel Ritual by British horror novelist David Pinner, who sold the film rights to actor Christopher Lee in the ’70s (the much-mocked Neil LaBute-directed remake credits Pinner as the original inspiration for the story). Sadly, it’s currently out of print in the U.S. Both narratives deal with a hapless police officer’s attempt to get to the bottom of mysterious events in a truly strange town in rural England, and both end with a fiery ritual straight out of your nightmares. The story was turned into a novel in 1978, five years after the film’s release, when it was already on its way to becoming a cult horror classic; this quasi-novelization, penned by the film’s director, Robin Hardy, alongside playwright Anthony Shaffer, is still widely available, and adds a bit of ambiguity to the original ending.