8. D.P. Watt
A story that takes for its subject the secret language and culture of the now near extinct Punch and Judy shows and showmen, most often associated with entertaining children at the British seaside. Through a series of documents and interviews, the narrator slowly unravels an esoteric order of puppetry that is both enchanting and ghastly, with suggestions of another dimension accessed through dream and talismanic words, in which childhood friends take on a weird and sinister life within ours: "in a note in the margin of a page torn from a book, with a picture of an old ghost puppet from the 1840s, Dad had written, "It looks just like the sad thing that used to watch me from the orchard when I was a child". Then, from another source: "It’s not a he, it’s a she. And she doesn’t need eyes, she sees with her skin – like God, or like Baggy."
The story creates in imaginative investigation into the grotesque and fascinating folklore of the British Isles, which is so broad and enigmatic, I wonder why so few writers explore it, rather than continuing with an overreliance on the Hollywoodish horror that seems aimed at teenagers.
Recommendation: Almost Insentient, Almost Divine (Undertow)
