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Modern Folklore
Four years ago, Hugh Campbell was newly dumped and single again for the first time in years. He called on his longtime friend Bobby for help moving. That was the last time Bobby saw him…
Unless you count the Black Metal show where a woman with long, dark hair was leading him out of the bar…
A woman who looked like the one Bobby saw outside Hugh’s building the morning after moving day…
Inferring what he can from a few off-kilter text messages from Hugh, about a nighttime assailant in the new apartment who also has long, dark hair, Bobby reconstructs Hugh’s week of suffering.
He appeals to horror stories for an explanation, but he knows…
What scares us most is what's already inside.
“A creepingly mysterious story that comes on deceptively familiar before it tips from discomfiting into truly horrifying” - NABEN RUTHNUM, author of Helpmeet
Unless you count the Black Metal show where a woman with long, dark hair was leading him out of the bar…
A woman who looked like the one Bobby saw outside Hugh’s building the morning after moving day…
Inferring what he can from a few off-kilter text messages from Hugh, about a nighttime assailant in the new apartment who also has long, dark hair, Bobby reconstructs Hugh’s week of suffering.
He appeals to horror stories for an explanation, but he knows…
What scares us most is what's already inside.
“A creepingly mysterious story that comes on deceptively familiar before it tips from discomfiting into truly horrifying” - NABEN RUTHNUM, author of Helpmeet
- GenresHorror
188 pages, Paperback
Published September 12, 2024
17 people want to read
About the author
Daniel Perry
6 books19 followersDaniel Perry is the author of the novella Modern Folklore (Little Ghosts Books, 2024) and the short story collections Nobody Looks That Young Here (Guernica, 2018) and Hamburger (Thistledown, 2016). His fiction has been short-listed for the Carter V. Cooper Prize, and has appeared in more than 30 publications including Joyland, The Dalhousie Review, Exile: The Literary Quarterly, SubTerrain, Riddle Fence, Little Fiction and the Stone Skin Press anthology The Lion and the Aardvark (U.K.). He has also published book reviews in The Malahat Review, The Antigonish Review and Broken Pencil. He has lived in Toronto since 2006.
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
November 4, 2024
I don't think I've ever read a horror story where the narrator isn't actually involved in the main action of the plot. That fact lends an uncertainty to features of this story that leaves the reader feeling off-kilter throughout. Sometimes it's more pronounced than others; sometimes I forgot entirely that the story wasn't in the POV of the protagonist. This provides a fascinating twist on the classic ghost story and speaks back to the traditional trope of the 'hauntee' feeling like they are losing their mind.
By the end of the book, I wondered how much of what I'd just read only existed in the narrator's head, made up for the reader because he was disillusioned with his own life and was taking refuge in telling stories. In this way, the book reminded me a little of Stephen King, with his reliance on writer POV characters, but again it speaks back to the trope and makes it its own.
Too often horror stories suffer from an overreliance on explanations and reasons. We are obsessed with resolution, with figuring out what the ghost wants. We want everything tied up with a bow (the ghost is mad that we're renovating the house, so let's call a priest and sort this out!), but in reality, the paranormal isn't like that. Talk to anyone who has a so-called ghost story, and they'll tell you "I can't explain what happened" or "I don't know why it started/stopped". But when we're reading a book, we want that explanation, and writers can easily ruin a really good spooky story by explaining absolutely everything. The appeal of a spooky story is the unknown, the unexplained. And that's what this book does really, really well.
By the end of the book, I wondered how much of what I'd just read only existed in the narrator's head, made up for the reader because he was disillusioned with his own life and was taking refuge in telling stories. In this way, the book reminded me a little of Stephen King, with his reliance on writer POV characters, but again it speaks back to the trope and makes it its own.
Too often horror stories suffer from an overreliance on explanations and reasons. We are obsessed with resolution, with figuring out what the ghost wants. We want everything tied up with a bow (the ghost is mad that we're renovating the house, so let's call a priest and sort this out!), but in reality, the paranormal isn't like that. Talk to anyone who has a so-called ghost story, and they'll tell you "I can't explain what happened" or "I don't know why it started/stopped". But when we're reading a book, we want that explanation, and writers can easily ruin a really good spooky story by explaining absolutely everything. The appeal of a spooky story is the unknown, the unexplained. And that's what this book does really, really well.
July 9, 2025
An underbaked story about alcoholism, the limits of friendship, and of course, a succubus (maybe), Modern Folklore is an overtly unreliable narrative reconstruction of the last week that the narrator, Bobby, saw Hugh Campbell alive.
The voicing technique is used to good effect, and we're left to understand in the end that, for all the suggestions of supernatural horror, Hugh's decline is likely woefully mundane.
Unfortunately, this book is full of missed opportunities and thematic dead ends, weird anachronisms, and awkward plot holes. In particular, the choice to set Hugh's encounter with Becca at a black metal show seems arbitrary at best, and the book makes me suspicious of Daniel Perry's knowledge of Toronto's metal scene. For all of the references to Toronto (most of which add absolutely nothing to the story), it's wild to me that he couldn't have name-dropped a metal bar like Hard Luck or Bovine Sex Club. Hell, I'm almost suspicious of Perry's knowledge of metal, period, which makes me wonder why he would bother using it in such a prominent scene at all. Hugh's last known location could have been set at a generic hard rock show and it would have felt more natural, since Perry seems far more comfortable talking about AC/DC's lineup woes than he does extreme metal, making painfully dated references to the crimes of a few Norwegian black metal bands and calling out that there are, indeed, plenty of neo-nazi shitheads in the black metal scene. It all feels incredibly culturally aloof, and as an aging headbanger it was hard for me to gloss over this misstep.
A ruthless editor (to say nothing of a copy edit) would have made this story a lot stronger, cleaning up bizarre grammatical choices that are—after a while—hard to attribute to our unreliable narrator who may just happen to have dodgy grammar, and catching flaws in pop culture references (that the narrator, as a horror fan, absolutely would have known [I'm pretty sure it's Ray Stantz who gets pleasured by a ghost, not Pete Venkman]) and media choices (I'm pretty sure this story's set in the 2020s, which would have made Hugh Campbell 15 between, say 2005-2015, and I'm supposed to believe that Bobby gifted him AC/DC's Back in Black on...cassette? And that he, a white boy from Toronto already exposed to hard rock, doesn't have any idea what black metal is?).
It's Daniel's empathetic treatment of two unremarkable, deeply boring alcoholics and their struggles with self-image and loneliness that really carries the story. Bobby isn't just distancing himself from Hugh as he tries to recreate that week, he's distancing himself from a distorted mirror-self that reflects all his failures as an alcoholic and projecting them onto Hugh by having him struggle against a supernatural force symbolic of his addiction and weariness. By leveraging the folktale—and the story-telling knowledge he's amassed through his (again, weirdly dated and thin) love of horror films—to shield himself from what he's really doing as he confabulates Hugh's missing week, the horror Bobby creates is deeply personal.
I just wish this story did more to connect its elements to its themes.
The voicing technique is used to good effect, and we're left to understand in the end that, for all the suggestions of supernatural horror, Hugh's decline is likely woefully mundane.
Unfortunately, this book is full of missed opportunities and thematic dead ends, weird anachronisms, and awkward plot holes. In particular, the choice to set Hugh's encounter with Becca at a black metal show seems arbitrary at best, and the book makes me suspicious of Daniel Perry's knowledge of Toronto's metal scene. For all of the references to Toronto (most of which add absolutely nothing to the story), it's wild to me that he couldn't have name-dropped a metal bar like Hard Luck or Bovine Sex Club. Hell, I'm almost suspicious of Perry's knowledge of metal, period, which makes me wonder why he would bother using it in such a prominent scene at all. Hugh's last known location could have been set at a generic hard rock show and it would have felt more natural, since Perry seems far more comfortable talking about AC/DC's lineup woes than he does extreme metal, making painfully dated references to the crimes of a few Norwegian black metal bands and calling out that there are, indeed, plenty of neo-nazi shitheads in the black metal scene. It all feels incredibly culturally aloof, and as an aging headbanger it was hard for me to gloss over this misstep.
A ruthless editor (to say nothing of a copy edit) would have made this story a lot stronger, cleaning up bizarre grammatical choices that are—after a while—hard to attribute to our unreliable narrator who may just happen to have dodgy grammar, and catching flaws in pop culture references (that the narrator, as a horror fan, absolutely would have known [I'm pretty sure it's Ray Stantz who gets pleasured by a ghost, not Pete Venkman]) and media choices (I'm pretty sure this story's set in the 2020s, which would have made Hugh Campbell 15 between, say 2005-2015, and I'm supposed to believe that Bobby gifted him AC/DC's Back in Black on...cassette? And that he, a white boy from Toronto already exposed to hard rock, doesn't have any idea what black metal is?).
It's Daniel's empathetic treatment of two unremarkable, deeply boring alcoholics and their struggles with self-image and loneliness that really carries the story. Bobby isn't just distancing himself from Hugh as he tries to recreate that week, he's distancing himself from a distorted mirror-self that reflects all his failures as an alcoholic and projecting them onto Hugh by having him struggle against a supernatural force symbolic of his addiction and weariness. By leveraging the folktale—and the story-telling knowledge he's amassed through his (again, weirdly dated and thin) love of horror films—to shield himself from what he's really doing as he confabulates Hugh's missing week, the horror Bobby creates is deeply personal.
I just wish this story did more to connect its elements to its themes.
November 13, 2024
Great read!
Read
January 5, 2025It's too local and tries to give the main character a halo of a modern adventurer but it falls off. It's a waste of time reading it
October 26, 2024
Bobby recounts the final week of a friend that has disappeared.
A short, sweet, creepy succubus story. Less monstary and more creepy feeling/being restrained against your will.
Half way through it started reminding me a bit of a movie I watched a while ago called Mara (then to me surprise a later name drop).
A short, sweet, creepy succubus story. Less monstary and more creepy feeling/being restrained against your will.
Half way through it started reminding me a bit of a movie I watched a while ago called Mara (then to me surprise a later name drop).
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews