KEVIN BRYAN reviews new releases by The Outlaws, Mark Radcliffe & David Boardman, Clarence White
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England’s ghosts
ANDY HEDGECOCK recommends two collections of short stories that use a single location to connect the narratives, and explore the limits of our ability to understand the world
[Public Domain/CC] 
BOB NEWLAND reviews a book that will take many back to the final years of apartheid in South Africa
GAVIN O’TOOLE examines the fatal relationship between environmental crimes and politics in Brazil and the inspiration provided by Indigenous people
MARIA DUARTE and LEO BOIX review Little Trouble Girls, Big Boys, The Roses, and Caught Stealing
MARY CONWAY admires a study of environmental idealism that aspires to Chekhov but is arrested in a deluge of middle-class opinion
ANGUS REID questions whether a human scriptwriter is behind the multiple plagiarisms of Disney’s much-lauded and vacuous extension of the Alien franchise
The Hotel
Daisy Johnson, Jonathan Cape, £14.99
Barrowbeck
Andrew Michael Hurley, John Murray, £16.99
THESE books share a common origin. Commissioned as story sequences for Radio 4 by BBC producer Justine Willett, they were read by a distinguished cast of voice actors.
There are further similarities. They use the imagery and atmospheres of contemporary folk horror — a sense of foreboding, ambiguous perceptions, undercurrents of violence and a collision of the mythic with the mundane — to explore the influence of landscape on psychology.
Furthermore, both books focus on single locations and present a view of history in line with the fabulist Russell Hoban’s assertion that “the past is something that sticks to your shoes like cow shit.”
Similar stories
MIKE COWLEY welcomes half a century of remarkable work, that begins before the Greens and invites a connection to — and not a division from — nature
ANDREW HEDGECOCK relishes visual storytelling with no respect for genres, movements or styles
JONATHAN TAYLOR is entranced by a collection that touches themes of homelessness, loneliness and abuse with dream-like imagery
ANDY HEDGECOCK recommends the application of ‘Gothic Marxism’ for its memorable portrayal of the physical violence done to working people