BOOKBUSTER REVIEW: Hellebore’s 2024 Yuletide Hauntings & other Occult and Uncanny Zines
REVIEW BY TIM BARTON
On December 7th this year, Bookbuster ran a stall at the Mint House in Pevensey. This was a great venue for an esoteric fayre, and this one, ‘Making Misrule’, is just their latest makers’ market. Alongside crafts, tarot stalls, and tattooists, there was folk-music and a mummers play: Hastings was well represented. In the evening, the fabulous Goblin Band had a sold-out concert, playing a variety of folk-music of the British Isles.
The contemporary folk-revival has not lost any momentum, and, amongst the best-selling books and zines, pride of place still goes to Hellebore and Weird Walk. The former just put out their second Yuletide special, already shifting fast. It follows hot on the heels of their twelfth issue, ‘story-telling’ themed, which landed just in time for Samhain.
The first piece in issue 12 covers 1980s ‘dark fantasy’, featuring Bowie as the Goblin King in Labyrinth, and other cult movies, including The Dark Crystal, and The Company of Wolves. Other pieces discuss Robin Hood, Tam Lin, and the Fairy Queen, plus features on storytellers Susanna Clark and Alan Garner.
A WARNING TO THE CURIOUS
The Hellebore Yule special, ‘a summoning of seasonal terrors’, has the wonderfully named Verity Holloway ‘summoning the spirit’ of the Black Prince of Cornwall. There are also articles by Keri O’Shea on the Woman in Black; John Callow on the black dog of Isle of Man’s Peel Castle; and editor Maria J Perez Cuervo spooking us out about Uncanny Children. Other essays here give us an eldritch peek at yuletide hauntings, ghosts sightings, spiritualism and other ‘metaphysical mysteries’. As ever, Hellebore is a quality zine, and has excellent artwork throughout.
Weird Walk’s latest offerings are a taster for Ben Edge’s super new book Folklore Rising, in the form of a highly illustrated zine entitled ‘Folklore Activist’, and pamphlet, ‘Cromlech’, about the kistvaen named ‘Devil’s Den’ in Wiltshire. This is one of the UK’s best dolmens. Its history is discussed, alongside copious and moody photographs. A must for the ‘modern antiquarian’ fans.
New zines are popping up all the time alongside these classic publications. Two of the more recent ones are Wort and Occulture. The latter is subtitled ‘a warning to the curious’, and they have issued their third and fourth zines this year, one a Special, the ‘cinema issue’, and also volume 2 of their ‘ordinary’ edition, this one themed ‘the devil’s party’. The zines all feature ace collage art, and in this latest offering talk about ‘mass possessions’, satanism, ‘the demonic feminine’, and pieces on the devil and demons. George Parr writes of the devil in the English landscape, calling him ‘Britain’s biggest loser’.
A BRIDGE BETWEEN THE PAST AND FUTURE
Meanwhile, Wort, ‘a journal of radical, rooted relational herbalism’, hits its second issue. This has poetry and fiction, but primary esoterically inclined non-fiction. Katie Hastings (not from Hastings!) and Sinead Fortune write on ‘saving seeds’. Katie tells about a Welsh seed-saving collective, Llafur Ni, who are reviving rare ‘black oats’; Sinead tells about the ‘seed sovereignty programme UK’. Then we get a feature on the ‘Palestinian Heirloom Seed Library’, based in the West Bank. Clearly, they are somewhat beleaguered by their neighbours who show no respect for the past and target artefacts that show a long history for Arab people there. Consequently the collective running the project seek to preserve seeds from the Makhrour Valley, an area that has signs of irrigation systems going back 4000 years. ‘Preserving and propagating seeds draws a bridge between the past and future.’ Other articles cover ‘planet medicine and the tarot’, ‘foraging as resistance; an artist’s use of woad, ‘Slavic oak’, Hasujiku Tanaka on the ginkgo tree, and more.
Hellebore’s blurb describes the zine as a ‘tribute to the supernatural richness of Britain’. This is, I think, true of most of this new generation of folkloric zines. They fit right in with the spectrum of contemporary culture from Mark Fisher’s Weird & the Eerie, through hauntology, psychogeography, and Julian Cope’s antiquarian writings, to more practical esoterica as represented by Wort, and the resurgence of interest in ‘folk horror’, especially in both cinema – nicely book-ended by the Wicker Man and Midsommer – and zine culture. Long may it last. Happy Yuletide, one and all!
All zines reviewed available from Bookbuster, 39 Queens Road, Hastings TN34 1RE
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