Book Review – November 2024
I woke to thud and a crack, a small face ricocheting away from the glass. The features – much like my own – creased into a familiar frown. A spurt of blood spilled from a crevice in the brow, running in thick lines down to the chin.
Dark Play is a collection of linked short stories by Tim Cooke, each one featuring a father and young daughter living in an isolated farmhouse on a Welsh hillside. Cooke’s stories were inspired by the concept of ‘dark play’ developed by the American professor of drama, Richard Schechner. In Schechner’s dark play some or all of the participants are not aware they are taking part in a game and, implicitly, they are unable to consent to their participation.
Play is, indeed, at the heart of this collection. The girl, Nia, does not appear to have any friends nor is it ever mentioned that she attends a school. But she has a fertile imagination and is well-versed in the art of playing alone. But perhaps never completely on her own. Her father, often an observer, is at other times, some of the stories seem to suggest, an active participant. But the real connection in Nia’s play, and the channel whereby more sinister elements seem to enter her games, is with the remote landscape all about them and the stories of the people who lived and died there. Within the orbit her play, and spilling out of these games, the landscape and its tales seem to come to life.
Reality and imaginative play are tumbled together. Are Nia’s stories real and, indeed, is her dad a reliable narrator? We are offered no easy answers, but palpable feelings of dread tighten their grip as each tale unfolds. Driving home after a pub meal in the opening story, The Judgement, Nia asks her father about the ladies she saw while he went to the toilet as they were leaving. They were in a red room in the pub with candles, flowers and a funny smell: The woman with brown teeth asked me about you. Do you think she knows that we live up here? Later, in The Visitor, on a stormy evening, someone unexpected really does come to their door. Dad had just entertained Nia with a strange story of a persecuted witch who wandered the local hills looking for her now demolished cottage. She would appear to people in a variety of disguises, so the young male hiker, soaked to the skin and asking to use the phone, immediately raised Nia’s suspicions. Then, in a later story, a game which starts as a silly prank leads to that worst nightmare of any parent, a missing child.
The stories, some of them very short, are linked and all centre on Nia and her father. But they do not follow a linear arc; nor does the beginning of one story pick-up on the ending of the previous one. Instead the reader is left to puzzle how the various episodes fit together. Perhaps they follow a cyclical pattern or even, in a nightmarish way, they are locked in a continuous loop.
Other characters appear in some of the stories. Dad’s sister and her baby, in a story called The Conversion, come to visit. But they somehow seem to be characters within the framework of the underlying game rather than individuals acting with their own agency. Nia’s mother is a tangible absence throughout the stories. We are led to sense that something has happened, but we have no idea what this might be.
Then in the final story, Mother, she is suddenly there alongside Nia and Dad helping her husband to host a barbecue for friends. But what should be a carefree, relaxing afternoon becomes steadily more unsettling and the very landscape around them seems to exude portents of menace. As a moment of real horror approaches the reader becomes aware of a malign influence reaching both backwards and forwards through time.
Tim Cooke has set his collection of ‘weird’ stories in the land which gave birth to a much older collection of tales, The Mabinogion. His great achivement with Dark Play is to take a contemporary narrative and ground it in a much older, storied landscape. Past tragedies, injustices and pain are alluded to and, through Cooke’s stories, a lingering darkness soaks through into the present day. A remarkable feat in just 67 pages.
Tim Cooke
Tim Cooke is a teacher, writer and creative writing PhD student. He was the winner of the New Welsh Writing Awards 2022: Rheidol Prize for Prose with a Welsh Theme or Setting for his blended nonfiction book, River.
By pure coincidene, however, I finished my second reading of Tim Cooke’s Dark Play in bed shortly before midnight last night, and this morning I started reading Ghost of an Idea by William Burns. Cooke’s short story collection is excellent, though decidedly unsettling. Burns’s study of hauntology, folk horror and nostalgia so far promises to be both comprehensive and fascinating. I will review both of these books in these pages very soon.
Jeff Young is a writer for screen, stage and radio. A former senior lecturer in Creative Writing at Liverpool John Moores University, Jeff lives in Liverpool. He is also the author of Ghost Town.
Charlie Hill is an author from Birmingham. He has written long and short form memoir, and contemporary, historical and experimental fiction. He is the co-founder and former Director of a literary festival, the PowWow Festival of Writing, which ran from 2011 to 2017 and featured guests such as Joanne Harris, Alex Wheatle, Stewart Home and Natalie Haynes. He has also appeared at many such events, including Frankfurt’s Literaturm and the Birmingham Literary Festival.
Clevelode is Paul Newland and his collaborators. Newland was one-half of The Lowland Hundred, a critically acclaimed duo that released three albums, Under Cambrian Sky (2010), Adit (2011), The Lowland Hundred (2014).
Jon Woolcott is a writer and publisher and currently works for the independent publisher, Little Toller, where he also edits The Clearing, the online journal for new writing about place and nature. He is the author of 
Gareth E. Rees is the author of Unofficial Britain, longlisted for the Ondaatje Prize and one of The Sunday Times best books of the year 2020. He’s also the author of Car Park Life, The Stone Tide and Marshland. His first short story collection, Terminal Zones, was published in 2022 and examines the strangeness of everyday life in a time of climate change
In a similar fashion, a slew of other buildings have been reduced to rubble in recent decades. When the Hightown flats were built in the 1960s they were praised for their innovative design concept. The concrete components of the 191 flats were factory-built and assembled on site creating light, airy homes each forming part of a small, neighbourly cluster. Lack of investment in the 1980s and 1990s, however, caused the fabric of the flats to steadily deteriorate and they were demolished in 2011.
From a much earlier era, several of the Wrexham area’s large country houses have met a similar fate. 
The Vegetable Market, an indoor market hall built in 1898 with a mock-Tudor frontage was demolished in the 1980s to make way for a shopping centre.
Mark grew up in Berkshire but, arriving in London during the heyday of punk to study at the LSE, he felt that was where he belonged. Sundry abortive attempts at stardom followed, as a stand-up comedian, actor and musician. A successful career there as a shoe-seller followed, but Mark now lives in Somerset, England, doing what he loves best – writing. He has written a number of short stories, poems and other pieces of creative non-fiction which have been published online and in print.
and around water. But it was the tragic death of her friend, Kate, in a kayaking accident on the River Rawthey in Cumbria on New Year’s Day 2012 that proved to be the eventual catalyst for her to write The Flow. Kate’s death was a shattering blow to Beer and caused her to fall out of love with rivers and paddling. Several years later, while visiting the scene of her friend’s death, Beer has a sense of Kate’s presence, but not the catharsis she had hoped for. She was inspired, however, to embark on the travels and research that led to this book. Just like water The Flow eddies, swirls and percolates. And, as with water, Beer’s narrative meanders along across 400 pages, sometimes gentle, other times powerful, but always relentless in its cyclical lifeforce. She moves effortlessly from science to mythology, embracing nature and human activity and weaving in her own personal story.
details how she returned from London to the family farm in Orkney to overcome her alcoholism with hard manual labour, cold water swimming and the security of a familiar place. Now sober and a successful writer, Liptrot feels there is still something missing in her life. She is reluctant to admit to herself that what she lacks is something as simple and conventional as a relationship with a significant other, but she suspects that is indeed the case. She travels to Berlin, a city awash with other drifters, seekers and creatives. She finds cheap accommodation and spends her time walking, birdwatching and people watching. She also trawls the dating apps obsessively and embarks on a series first dates, with varying degrees of success. The Instant is a painfully humane account of alienation, loneliness and self-discovery in our current digital age.
This is oral history at its most incisive and revealing. Some of King’s interviewees are household names: Neil Kinnock, Peter Hain, Dafydd Iwan and Leanne Wood, for instance. Others are less well-known but are nonethelees important to the strands of the story that King weaves together. Activists, and in particular women, from the Welsh language campaign, miners’ support groups, the second homes campaign and CND are given great prominence. The final two decades of the twentieth century witnessed several crucial steps in Wales’s journey towards re-asserting its national identity and for the Welsh to recover their self confidence as a people. This process resulted in the creation of a Welsh National Assembly and Assembly Government in 1999, which later evolved into the nation’s Senedd and Welsh Government. Prior to this, the Welsh Language Act of 1993 put Welsh on an equal footing with English for the first time and , incrementally, began to reverse the decline of the Welsh language. The establishment of a Welsh language television channel, S4C, had already brought Welsh into the daily discourse of both native speakers and learners from 1982 onwards.
psychogeographer John Rogers takes to print again with another consideration of his favourite subject matter: London. Welcome to New London focuses in particular on the changes wrought to East London by the legacy of the 2012 Olympics. Rogers vividly captures the struggle for the future of this part of the city and examines the contest of ownership and identity between local residents and developers as well as the ongoing fight for survival by nature. He guides us through the neglected corners of London, taking time out to investigate the capital’s concealed rivers and the cultural significance of graffiti. Rogers clearly has no illusions about the negative aspects of London, but his love for the city’s flawed beauty shines through.
Paul Simpson was a key figure in the Liverpool music scene of the late 1970s and early 1980s. He played with Will Sergeant and Ian McCulloch before they launched Echo and the Bunnymen and he then formed The Teardrop Explodes with Julian Cope before going on to put together his own band, The Wild Swans. Despite critical acclaim, penning one of the best singles of the 1980s (in my opinion) in Revolutionary Spirit, a strong following in Liverpool and, we read in Simpson’s record of those years, an odd pocket of popularity in the Philippines, success ultimately eluded the Swans. This is a very readable account of a fascinating and influential time and place in post-punk music. Simpson underpins this story with some frank disclosures, by way of exorcism perhaps, about his difficulties with mental health and his relationship with his father.