Dawn Keetley
British horror writer Bernard Taylor has been completely ignored in the recent swell of folk horror criticism. He is not mentioned, for instance, in Adam Scovell’s Folk Horror: Hours Dreadful and Things Strange (2017), my first go-to for folk horror (especially British). At least two of his novels, however, The Reaping (1980) and The Moorstone Sickness (1982), are interesting exemplars of the genre – and their complete absence from discussions of the folk horror tradition is a little baffling. We took up The Reaping in a Horror Homeroom Conversations podcast, and so, here, I will address the slightly later (and actually much better) Moorstone Sickness.
The erasure of Taylor’s novels from the folk horror tradition must stem in part from the fact that they fall quite definitively in the low-brow horror tradition. Much of the most-lauded folk horror fiction and film has either a high-brow pedigree or aspirations to this pedigree – from writers such as Nathaniel Hawthorne through M. R. James, Algernon Blackwood, Arthur Machen, Thomas Tryon, and Andrew Michael Hurley. Illustrative of the fact that Taylor has not been taken seriously as a writer, Will Errickson does not discuss The Moorstone Sickness on his Too Much Horror Fiction website – a virtually comprehensive survey of vintage horror literature. He does, though, include its original paperback cover, from 1982, commenting, “But how about that Moorstone (St. Martin’s Press, 1981 [sic]) cover? Never get tired of drippy blood-letters!”[i] In a similar vein, Grady Hendrix’s Paperbacks from Hell (2017) does not include any discussion of Taylor’s actual novels, even though his book is punctuated by images of the more lurid of those novels’ covers.[ii]
What is behind the “drippy blood-letters” of The Moorstone Sickness has not, it seems, been worthy of attention. My view is that it very much is – and, in this essay, I argue that The Moorstone Sickness is valuable both for its own actually chilling horror narrative and for the way it illuminates what are the major narrative tropes and thematic preoccupations of first-wave folk horror.
When analyzing a little-known novel, it’s often illustrative to consider what company it keeps, and, in that regard, I would identify six specific bedfellows of Taylor’s The Moorstone Sickness: “The Trade-Ins,” a Twilight Zone episode broadcast in 1962 (and written by Rod Serling),[iii] The Witches (Cyril Frankel, 1966), Thomas Tryon’s Harvest Home (1973), The Stepford Wives (Ira Levin’s 1972 novel and Bryan Ford’s 1975 film), the ITV series Children of the Stones (1977) and – looking forward – Jordan Peele’s Get Out (2017). The influence (and aftermath) of these literary and cinematic touchstone texts should become clear as I explore this novel’s (distinctly folk horror) plot.
The plot . . . thickens
The Moorstone Sickness begins with the young couple, Hal and Rowan Graham, along with their long-time housekeeper Mrs. Prescot, moving from London to Moorstone, a village south of the village of Dartmeet and deep within Dartmoor. The novel opens with their journey (like so much folk horror), and, on the very first page, Taylor asserts what is arguably the central tension of the genre: “It was hard to believe that in England’s narrow, overpopulated confines such space, such peace and quiet, could still be found” (1). In hailing from the “overpopulated” city of London and moving to what they expect will be a rural space of unchanging beauty and peace, Hal and Rowan trace a familiar folk horror path – one traveled, to give only a few examples, by Norah Palmer from the BBC’s Robin Redbreast (James MacTaggart, 1970), Ned and Beth Constantine in Tryon’s Harvest Home, Joanna and Walter Eberhart in The Stepford Wives, and (more recently) by Chris Washington from Get Out, and Harper Marlowe from Men (Alex Garland, 2022). As is true for all of these characters, however, the rural idyll is soon pierced. In The Moorstone Sickness, as the Grahams approach Moorstone, they almost run over an older woman walking down the middle of the road. She runs away, and, when Hal follows her, she briefly stops to tell him how she used to paint the chalk pit and its beautiful surroundings before she inexplicably throws herself into that same chalk pit, plummeting to her death.
After that disquieting introduction to the countryside, the Grahams begin to settle into their life in the small village that is now their new home. “They’re such nice people,” Rowan says of the Cassens, who left them food on their arrival (9). And, indeed, everyone in Moorstone is eminently “nice” (and, here, anyone who’s watched Children of the Stones or The Stepford Wives should start to feel suspicious). The inhabitants of Moorstone are also characterized by their attachment to place: either they’ve always lived in the village and never left – or they left and inevitably returned. Paul Cassen affirms Rowan’s sense that Moorstone is “a good place to be” and that it instantaneously feels like home. He continues that “everyone” feels that way, “[e]ven those who’ve lived here and then have to leave for some reason or other. . . . [T]hey always return, it seems – always” (49). Rowan, who seems more immediately attached to the place than Hal, agrees: “Moorstone is the kind of place I’d want to return to – to rest” (51).
Of course, it’s not long before such a surfeit of “niceness” and such a powerful attachment to place begins to appear sinister. Hal and Rowan have not been in Moorstone long before they meet another relative “newcomer,” Alison Lucas, who is working for the elderly writer, Edith Carroll (33). Alison is soon confiding to the couple that she thinks the villagers are “a little too nice” (58), telling Hal that they are “too damn perfect” and that they remind her “of those freaky Californian religions where everyone goes around being loving and understanding and non-aggressive” (61). Alison also makes the propensity of villagers to return to the village (if they ever even leave it) sound more like entrapment than attachment. “None of the Moorstone people leaves the village forever,” she says. “Those who go always return eventually” (63). Alison also points out to the Grahams how people in Moorstone seem to dramatically change after they’ve been there a while. (Here we get the biggest nod to The Stepford Wives and Children of the Stones – and an anticipation of Get Out.) She tells Hal and Rowan that she used to be friends with another recent arrival in the village, Mary Hughes, but Mary became a seemingly different person after the elderly person she worked for died. There’s something “phoney” about the place, she concludes (98).
Of course, the sudden change in the personalities of young newcomers to the village when, coincidentally, the elderly people they’re working for die – is the clue to what’s going on in Moorstone. This is brought home to Rowan and Hal when Alison herself changes – and they come to learn, too, that it’s also no accident that the elderly people, when they die, leave all their money and property to their young erstwhile employees.
Moorstone’s secret / ritual
The secret at the center of The Moorstone Sickness is one that no doubt becomes clear to the reader before it becomes clear to Hal and Rowan (and it can certainly be inferred from the literary and cinematic company the novel so evidently keeps). The secret centers on an isolated hill that looms by the village, on top of which there is a “huge crest of stone,” with one large stone standing out in particular. When Alison takes Rowan to see it early in the novel, Rowan asks if it is “some kind of geological freak.” Alison declares, though, that “it must have been brought here in ancient times. Like with Stonehenge and those other stones. Probably for use in some pagan rites or something” (72). And, yes, the “Stone” is indeed used for “pagan rites,” as Hal and Rowan discover for certain only when they themselves wake up, naked and bound, in the center of the sacrificial stone (171-72). The ritual Hal and Rowan are now unwillingly a part of is a ‘body swap’ with their elderly housekeeper (Mrs. Palfrey) and the nearly-dead former owner of their house, Lewis Childs, recently crippled in a car accident. Palfrey and Childs will take over Rowan’s and Hal’s bodies, and Rowan and Hall will wake up from the ritual in the elderly bodies of Palfrey and Childs. There is an “Old Folks’ Home” – Primrose House – on the outskirts of the village, where the young, now trapped in old people’s bodies, are consigned until death (64-5).
Lying on the sacrificial stone, Hal realizes what is happening: “He and Rowan were just two of the endless number that had passed this way. Who knew how many there had been? Who knew how many there would be in the future? There would be no end to them. The whole thing would just go on and on . . .” (177). When Hal returns to consciousness in the wake of the ritual, he looks down at “the body that was his own now – at the ugly, crippled form that had so recently belonged to the other. Now it was Childs’s no longer; now it was his. He had known it would happen, but the knowing hadn’t prepared him for the horror of the reality” (183). Hal remembers back to his encounter with the elderly woman by the chalk pit, before they even reached Moorstone, knowing now, fully, that he had been looking at the horror of a young woman – “her soul, her mind, her personality – her talent, too” – who was “trapped in an old, cancerous, discarded shell of a body” (184).
The ending of The Moorstone Sickness is, indeed, horrifying. It is about the horror of aging and decaying, something that typically (and mercifully) happens slowly enough that the appalling nature of what is happening is muted by day-to-day, hour-to-hour acclimation. For Hal and Rowan – and the other young sacrificial victims of Moorstone – the shock of aging and infirmity comes on all at once. Hal tries to sit up but can’t: “This body, this ruin of a shell in which he was clothed, was now a part of himself” (185). As Hal realizes here, bodies are not ancillary aspects of our being; they are not mere accidental matter in which the immortal soul, or maybe the “self” or “personality,” is housed. The body is an integral part of identity, an integral part of who we are, who we can become. Now suddenly bound to elderly, ill, and crippled bodies, Hal and Rowan cannot face who they inevitably are. They drag themselves to the edge of the stone buttress and fall into darkness.
Despite the fact that The Moorstone Sickness is undoubtedly derivative, despite the fact that its central plot device is obvious to the reader long before it dawns on its central characters, its ending is one of the more existentially chilling conclusions to a novel I’ve encountered. It’s a horror rooted in the horror of young people coming suddenly to experience the reality of age and illness – a horror that the old and the sick manage, sometimes, in coming at it gradually, to keep at bay. For Hal and Rowan, though, it is like a darkness abruptly descending that makes life simply unbearable.
The heart of folk horror – fertility and reproduction
The central ritual at the end of The Moorstone Sickness puts the novel in company with many folk horror narratives, not least in that the culminating sacrifice centers the reproduction of life. Folk horror, perhaps more than anything else, is about offering up sacrifices to ensure the fertility of land or people (or both) – take, for example, The Wicker Man (Robin Hardy, 1973), Harvest Home, Stephen King’s “Children of the Corn” (1977), Wake Wood (David Keating, 2009), and Midsommar (Ari Aster, 2019).
The Moorstone Sickness takes up a particular form of fertility – in this case, the reproduction of one’s own life – a kind of quest for immortality. It thus stands in company with Adam Nevill’s The Ritual (2011) and Get Out, as well as the earlier folk horror film, The Witches, all of which culminate in some way with a ritual specifically involving the sacrifice of the young to protract the life of the elderly.
Indeed, with its plot centered on a village with an aging population – a village in which the only young people seem to have been expressly lured there in order that the elderly villagers can forcibly occupy their bodies – The Moorstone Sickness taps into what I think is a central folk horror preoccupation with the shifting demographics of urban and rural spaces. Folk horror has, specifically, expressed anxieties about the movement of young people away from rural villages and the aging of rural spaces.
It is significant, then, that in Moorstone, the aging villagers reproduce not babies but themselves – luring in young people only so they can serve as bodies to perpetuate the lives of the elderly (and apparently childless). In this, The Moorstone Sickness most directly evokes the early folk horror film, The Witches, in which a well-known journalist, Stephanie Baxter, living in a quintessential English village, is planning a Satanic ritual to extend her life and expand her knowledge. Childless herself, and a successful professional woman, Baxter will sacrifice a local village girl so she can take over her body – quite literally reproducing herself through ritual rather than reproducing (a task left to the poorer locals). Like The Witches, The Moorstone Sickness express demographic anxiety and serves to cast some blame on older people (perhaps especially older women) who choose not to have children but to reach instead for their own longevity.
Folk horror and demographic decline
Besides depicting rituals in which older people grasp at immortality, reproducing themselves not children, another specific way in which folk horror manifests an anxiety about the loss of young people from rural communities is in the mere fact of the death or absence of children in those places. The childless Rowan and Hal, for instance, move to the country only after the devastating loss of their only child.[iv] They thus join the childless protagonists of other 1960s and 1970s folk horror. Besides The Witches, there is Robin Redbreast, in which childless, professional Londoner, Norah Palmer, must be tricked by the rural locals into getting pregnant; Baby (1976), in which a pregnant woman learns that the rural house and village she and her husband have moved to is cursed – and those who live there cannot reproduce; and Murrain (1975), which centers a childless older woman believed to be a ‘witch’ by her isolated community – not least, because she is childless.
Like these other folk horror narratives, The Moorstone Sickness is driven by the demographic anxiety that demonstrably drives much British folk horror of the late 1960s, 1970s, and early 1980s – that is, the post-baby-boom drop in fertility rates and in the population overall. The first wave of folk horror occurred simultaneously with a dramatic fall in birthrates and overall population in Britain. Indeed, Eric Kaufmann writes that fertility rates all across Western Europe “dropped below replacement” in the late 1960s (14, 16). In Britain, in particular, after hitting a post-war high in 1964, birthrates dropped sharply for over a decade (until 1978), charting a steep drop from 1,014,672 births each year to only 686,952.[v] Indeed, by 1975, “annual growth rate [of the population] was negative,” and the UK population actually “declined in size between 1975 and 1978” (Falkingham and Champion, 2016: 2).
Falkingham and Champion, Population Change in the UK, p. 2.
The dead and absent children of folk horror, I argue, starkly allegorize this decline.[vi]
The Moorstone Sickness in particular exemplifies the decline in births in Britain: Hal and Rowan’s lone child is dead and there are seemingly no other children in the village. When Hal tells (the seemingly childless) Paul Cassen about the death of their son, Hal concludes by saying (unconvincingly), about Moorstone, “And this is a good place in which to raise a family . . .” The novel continues: “Silence fell between them” (20). Paul signally fails to affirm Hal’s statement. Moorstone is not, actually, a good place to raise children.
That Hal and Rowan are childless and move to a village seemingly without children certainly suggests an anxiety about reproduction. It is telling in this regard, then, that most of the villagers, especially those who have engaged in the body-switching ritual, seem to be artists of some kind: the suicidal Mary Hughes worked for a painter; Alison works for the writer Edith Carroll; the housekeeper for Hal and Rowan, Mrs Palfrey, plays the piano, something she lost the ability to do with age and the breakdown of her body (80-1); and another villager, David Lockyer, writes music and used to be an actor (83-4). Indeed, one can make the case that, as artists, these villagers have always prioritized reproducing themselves (assuring their ‘immortality’ through art) rather than reproducing others. This dynamic is suggested when Hal tell Paul his reaction to the death of his son: “Well, I had my writing, and I just – just dived into it, I suppose” (19). From child to art. One or the other.
The Moorstone Sickness thus taps into fears of the dying rural village, populated increasingly by only elderly people and stark locale of Britain’s demographic decline. In discussing the patterns of internal migration in the 1970s and 1980s, specifically of urbanization and counterurbanization, Tony Champion notes that while many young people were still moving to London from all over Britain, others were leaving the large urban centers; yet, while younger couples moved “not just to the suburbs but to smaller cities and towns,” older people “retired to remoter rural areas where they previously enjoyed holidays” (130).[vii] Hal and Rowan are thus unusual in moving so far from London and to such an isolated rural location. Not surprisingly, they end up surrounded (only) by the elderly – whether they appear elderly or not, and they are soon to become – abruptly, horrifically – elderly themselves.
The folk horror adjacent Requiem for a Village (David Gladwell, 1975) dramatizes perfectly the demographic dynamic driving much first-wave folk horror – that is, anxiety about the elderly rural village, the dying village. In the film’s most famous scene, an elderly man tending the graveyard of the titular rural English village sees former inhabitants of the once thriving village rise from their graves, literally populating the village with the dead. He follows them into the church where both he and they are returned to a more youthful living state: they are, though, ghosts – the dead – returning from a bygone era. In The Moorstone Sickness, the elderly – those who should be dead but aren’t – don’t return from the grave but live on by coopting the bodies of the young.
Notes
[i] See Steffen Hantke’s essay in this special issue for a discussion of Will Errickson’s website, Too Much Horror Fiction, and canon making. While Taylor’s book was originally published as The Moorstone Sickness in hardback (1982), its first mass market paperback edition, from St Martin’s Press, shortened the title to the (in my view) better and more apt Moorstone.
[ii] See Hendrix, Paperbacks from Hell, for reproductions of covers of Taylor’s The Reaping (53), The Godsend (60), and Sweetheart, Sweetheart (159).
[iii] I have written an article on how this episode eerily anticipates some scenes (in particular) from Get Out.
[iv] This trope persists even through second wave folk horror – see Pet Sematary (1989), Wake Wood (2009), Kill List, The Woman in Black (2012), A Dark Song (2016), Apostle (2018), Andrew Michael Hurley’s novel, Starve Acre (2019), and the TV series Requiem (2018) and The Third Day (2020).
[v] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demography_of_the_United_Kingdom#Vital_statistics_(1900%E2%80%932018)
[vi] I talk about this a little bit, as well as anxieties over immigration, in “‘The Dark Is Here.’”
[vii] Significantly, an elderly couple had tried to buy the home Hal and Rowan buy – but the owner refuses the sale (Taylor 62). The village needs young people. Not, as is typically the case, so they can reproduce but, rather, so the elderly villagers can reproduce (themselves).
Works Cited
Champion, Tony. “Internal Migration and the Spatial Distribution of Population.” The Changing Population of Britain, edited by Heather Joshi, Basil Blackwell, 1989, pp. 110-32.
Falkingham, Jane, and Tony Champion. “Population Change in the UK: What Can the Last Twenty-Five Years Tell Us about the Next Twenty-Five Years?” Population Change in the United Kingdom, edited by Tony Champion and Jane Falkingham, Rowman and Littlefield, 2016, pp. 1-14.
Hendrix, Grady. Paperbacks from Hell. Quirk Books, 2017.
Kaufmann, Eric. White Shift: Populism, Immigration, and the Future of White Majorities. Abrams Press, 2019.
Keetley, Dawn. “‘The Dark Is Here’: The Third Day and Folk Horror’s Anxiety about Birth Rates, Immigration, and Race.” The Routledge Companion to Folk Horror, edited by Robert Edgar and Wayne Johnson, Routledge, 2023, pp. 355-65.
Keetley, Dawn. “The Twilight Zone Episode That Anticipates Get Out.” Horror Homeroom, 31 May 2018.
Scovell, Adam. Folk Horror: Hours Dreadful and Things Strange. Leighton Buzzard, UK: Auteur, 2017.
Taylor, Bernard. The Moorstone Sickness. 1982. Valancourt Books, 2015.
