I scraped away a line of dust from the glass to reveal the moth inside. It had faded too, its lower left wing detached almost entirely and now disintegrating at the bottom of the frame. Something struck me about the moth that I had not noticed before.

 

Many followers of this blog will know Adam Scovell’s work from his Celluloid Wicker Man site and his film, Holloway; the latter being made in collaboration with Robert Macfarlane. Scovell’s first book, Folk Horror: Hours Dreadful and Things Strange was published in 2017.

Mothlight, due to be published in February 2019, is the story of a young researcher whose present is haunted by the influence of a figure from his past. Thomas’s research focuses on the work of the late Dr Phyllis Ewans, an eminent lepidopterist whom he first met when he was a child. As he researches her writings and pictures, her grip on him grows and becomes ever more palpable.

Dr Ewans seems to grow inside Thomas like, Scovell seems to suggest, the grub of a parasitic wasp eating away at its host. Written in the first person, Mothlight has an atmosphere that is claustrophobic to the point of suffocation. We share Thomas’s grief at Dr Ewan’s death and live with him as his psyche gradually comes apart at the seams.

As he examines his late friend’s work Thomas appears to find patterns, but as quickly as the pieces of the puzzle come together, they fall apart. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Scovell writes with the eye of a cinematographer: his prose sweeps broadly across hilly landscapes and then closes in sharply to focus on the human face and the mind behind it.

Dr Ewans’s house is a place of dust, decay, memories and echoes. Thomas inhabits the house while he works on her papers and, as he does so, she in turn inhabits him. Adam Scovell’s first novel is a disturbing and haunting work and is a welcome addition to the English folk-horror oeuvre he has done so much to promote.

This review is based on an electronic advanced review copy of Mothlight provided by the publisher, Influx Press.