Figures Crossing the Field Towards the Group

Rebecca Gransden, London: Tangerine Press, 2025, 93pps., £15

DEREK TURNER reads a story of a domain’s downfall

This powerful novella is set in southern England, following some vaguely described disaster, which is causing everything to collapse, and everyone to flee in panic. “There’s something spreading up from the far south east,” one man ‘explains’ to protagonist Flo – “Humongous red blob expanding and inflating across the land.” Notwithstanding this creeping carmine menace, the determined Flo is on a quest to find her twin brother, ‘bro.’

The novella falls within a certain Anglo-apocalyptic tradition, where folk horror meets sci-fi and terrible things can happen in cosily familiar landscapes – Richard Jefferies’ After London, John Wyndham’s Day of the Triffids, Nigel Kneale’s Quatermass stories, the 1970s TV series Survivors, and 28 Days Later. But Gransden’s language is highly original – assured, forceful and inventive, made up largely of monosyllables, which gives a staccato, almost Old English quality. Flo is faintly reminiscent of Paul Kingsnorth’s ‘Buckmaster’ in The Wake – a strong-minded individual in a defeated land, whose existential plight is likewise expressed in an idioglossia that takes some getting used to. Some readers will find themselves yearning for longer words and sentences, but then Gransden’s country is a place of grim and elemental purpose, where the struggle for survival leaves no time for complex concepts.

From the outset, there are echoes of ancient epics and exhausted landscapes – “And the old red sun on the land. A slow wind stalks the brush. When the tide out at sea waits to run in green.” There is also brooding evil, as Flo sits on a clifftop and thinks “of a boy and the push that sent him down to the rock.” Was that boy who “falls to hell” bro? And was it Flo who pushed him?

Time circles and collapses in on itself, and the narrative disjoints. We see Flo some years earlier (or maybe more recently), running away from school and sleeping rough, finding a skeletal dying man, with insects already settling on him – “hair in his mouth, his knees poke out of holes in his pants, and he smells.” There are echoes and connections everywhere. Late in her wanderings she finds herself in Amesbury, Wiltshire – famous for a lavish Early Bronze Age burial, but now a setting for the twenty-first century’s fall.

Eerie strangeness is abroad, sometimes beautiful, much more often menacing – plants glow pink and gnash “at the air neath burnt day stars.” Birds are silent, but trees sing instead, “shrill and bleak.” There seem to be surreally expressed ecological concerns brooding behind the writing, as red ant armies march up out of drains, blue wasps sting dead black rats, and mutilated laboratory monkeys scream to see her. Toads are underfoot and climbing walls, and even opening their toothless maws to prophesy – a Biblical plague, appropriate for an England where everyone is in exodus – except a few left-behind loners awaiting their inevitable destruction, or clinging doggedly to delusions of salvation.

Lantern-carrying hooded religious visionaries seen by Flo in the depths of a black forest “murm as they eat the glow-worm” – an image that could have come from the hellscapes of the elder Bruegel or Hieronymus Bosch. Spindle-shanked gargoyle-demons have clambered down from church walls to stalk the shires for human prey, and terrified humans pushed to traumatic limits show themselves capable of equal evil.

Central and causative to England’s overthrow is a terrible sonic force – a sound first faintly heard and intriguing, like the seemingly sourceless Hum that some people today claim to hear in the atmosphere. In Gransden’s vigorous imagination, this possibly non-existent ambient noise becomes a cacophony and hurricane – a maddening and shrieking maelstrom of “cliff noise” which spits bees and beats people to the ground. Seemingly sentient, it finally comes for Flo, eating up the way she has come as she makes a last dash for the coast in desperate hope of escape. John of Gaunt’s fort and demi-paradise has become a howling and infected Alcatraz. This striking dystopia is uneasy reading, yet “a breath of old land and ghost voice spills from an age.”