The Hamlet

by Joanna Corrance

Screens go blank, radios go silent, and the government is advising everyone to stay indoors. The residents of a rural Scottish community abandon their picnics and return home. Everyone can sense that something is wrong, but little do they suspect just how wrong...

The Hamlet is a new novella by Scottish author Joanna Corrance, who delivers a fabulous tale that dances between horror and science fiction with an added dash of weird.

Our cast of characters are all inhabitants of the Hamlet, including Eve, a businesswoman stranded when the planes are grounded; Robyn, an artist who accepts a commission to create a dollhouse to exacting specifications, with dire consequences; Helen, desperate to provide content for her online followers; Jeanie, for whom monsters may be more real than even she realises; Polly, a neglected child who has her own unique way of coping with reality... Together, the lives of these and others enable us to piece together what really happened in a very peculiar rural community when ‘things got strange’.

“The Hamlet takes the reader on a surreal tour of a small community as they get to know their true selves in the height of a national emergency. With vividly drawn characters, and a strange and compelling narrative, this part body horror, part fairy tale novella marks Joanna Corrance as a writer to watch. I can’t wait to see what she does next.” – Sarah Pinborough

“This book is a work of genius.” – Jim McLeod

Genres: Horror

82 pages, Kindle Edition

Published May 9, 2025

Reviews

[Tomasz · Rating 4 out of 5]

The strangeness is here, the weirdness, the atmosphere is thick with dread, and yet I'm hesitating if these four stars aren't too many, because this is basically Matthew Bartlett relocated to Scotland and deprived of language skills (there's WAY too many spelling errors here). Stay for the mood, though.

[Jack Deighton · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was published as a novella but reads more like an assemblage of short stories with characters which cross over from one to the next, though outwith their own tale, usually only in brief appearances. Its background premise - something strange (but unspecified) has happened and people have been advised to remain indoors - may be a literary response to Covid. The setting is a small village in Scotland - locals call it a clachan but incomers have used the description hamlet (which I note is actually a particularly English designation) for so long that it has become more common. The village ‘spinsters,’ however, still frown upon it. Apart from the first, very short, chapter which introduces the strange event, each section is given over to the experiences of different characters, Beth, Polly, Helen, Eve, Robyn and Jeanie, with the novella ending with a sort of epilogue from the point of view someone called the Spaceman.
The stories’ time scales are not always immediately apparent as some chapters start before the strange event or more or less ignore it happening. However, there’s enough oddness going on even without it.
Responding to a voice calling to her, Beth, who has inherited her home from her mother and not improved it in any way, instead letting it run to squalor, manages to move through the pipes in her plumbing, whether by her shrinking or the pipes expanding is moot. Eventually she is drawn down to an underground chamber to chat with the spinsters about the end of the world. The chapters which follow may represent different ways in which that end happens.
Thanks to the green-suited spaceman who appears at her window one night, schoolgirl Polly travels the universe and becomes both a witch and a princess.
Helen begins to produce videos which attract internet followers but increasingly show her lack of control of her life.
To escape the locked down city Eve has come to the cottage she rents out to Matthew (known locally as the Pest.) Not a good choice.
At Helen’s request Robyn builds a doll’s house as an exact replica of Helen’s home but realizes it also needs a doll’s house inside it and then another inside that and so on down.
Jeanie begins to act strangely and eventually locks herself away from everyone. She is however revealed to be a figment, a skin the narrator wore to make her life more amenable. The implication is that all the viewpoint characters are such skins. (But this is the essence of fiction. The reader temporarily becomes – or at least empathises with – a book’s characters.)
The Spaceman is from another world.
The Hamlet has aspects of a fairy tale (but there do not seem to be any happy ever afters, except perhaps for Polly,) has some of the heightened sensibility of magic realism (with a faint echo of John Burnside’s Glister,) moments of horror, and makes a foray into Science Fiction. Whether the disparate elements necessarily cohere into a unified whole is a matter for the individual reader. Corrance can write though.

[Eamonn Murphy · Rating 4 out of 5]

‘The Hamlet’ is another book in ‘NP Novella set 2’, distinguished from ‘NP Novella set 1’ by their smaller size, so Newcon Press is saving trees. Chapter One is a prologue setting the scene: ‘It was an unusually hot day in early spring when all the screens turned black and the radios went silent. After a few moments, an announcement was made. A warning.’

Everyone has to go home and stay inside. With the screens blank and the radios silent, I’m not clear on how the announcement was made, perhaps by the new mobile phone alert service we have in the UK now. The story is set in a small rural community in Scotland, an idyllic location between the forest and the sea, with a mix of characters. In the subsequent chapters, we follow their individual stories, all interlocking and overlapping.

Beth is practically a recluse even before the event, ordering her shopping online and keeping herself to herself. When the plumbing goes wrong, she tries to fix it but somehow enters the pipes. At this point, you realise we’re in ‘New Weird’ territory. To be fair, the book is advertised as such.

Polly is a little girl with bad parents, whose life gets better when a wizard climbs out of her toybox. Helen McIvor is the perfect suburban wife and mother for whom everything must sparkle and she makes videos to show everyone how. Eve is a smart, wealthy businesswoman who retreats to the hamlet by instinct when the bad thing happens and moves in with her tenant, ‘Matthew the pest’, with unfortunate results. Robyn is a lady who loves small works of art and makes a dollhouse that gets complicated. This clever chapter was one of my favourite segments in the book. Not quite last, there’s Jeannie, who is so charming that she gets the perfect job and the perfect husband and a lovely house in the hamlet without really trying. There’s more to her than meets the eye. The last character would be a spoiler, so I won’t mention him.

In the ‘New Weird’, magical things happen without any explanation and it can get peculiar indeed, as it does here. But the strangeness is used to good effect to show character and every person in this story is a three-dimensional, real and memorable human being. There’s a dash of humour, too.

I’ve read short stories in this genre that made me throw the book across the room in exasperation because you get roped in, ride along eagerly and it suddenly stops with no conclusion because it can, because it’s New Weird and the author can do whatever they like. AAAAAGH!

Happily, that’s not the case here. It is all fantastic and there’s no explanation for any of it, but the clever interlocking stories and the real characters combine to make a charming little read. I rather enjoyed it and will look up the author’s other books, especially as, like Robyn the dollhouse maker, she specialises in small works of art. Small, intricate, polished and nearly perfect. Recommended.

[Holly Sands · Rating 5 out of 5]

An unsettling but oddly familiar set of interwoven stories, that really capture a sense of the sinister magic of fairytales and folklore. Left me wanting each character's story expanded upon, as it was so loaded with rich imagery - yet totally engaging, readable and difficult to put down.

[Lyndsey Croal · Rating 5 out of 5]

An eerie claustrophobic tale, exploring the darkness in domestic life in a hamlet facing unexplainable things at what may be the end of the world. Told in snippets of different characters, it oozes with tension, dark humour, and perfectly strange phenomena. Loved it!

[Farah Mendlesohn · Rating 4 out of 5]

Spooky little story, reminds me a bit of Shirley Jackson's work.

The short stories overlap and intertwine in ways that intrigue, and behind it all, lies The Strangeness.