The Summoning: Folk Horror and the Calendar Custom in Molly Aitken’s the Island Child (2020) and Zoe Gilbert’s Folk (2019)

Abstract

The UK has a rich calendar of folkloric traditional customs that continue to occur in our communities, even when their purpose is archaic or unknown. Folk Horror is most associated with cinema and television, and filmmakers consciously use calendar customs as a “summoning,” to epitomize the horror of the landscape, the isolation of the characters and their “skewed moral beliefs” (Scovell, “The Folk Horror Chain”). Though Folk Horror scholarship is new and emerging, this paper aims to interrogate whether two works of contemporary literary fiction, The Island Child by Molly Aitken (2020) and Folk by Zoe Gilbert (2019), could be considered Folk Horror, and how their respective employment of the calendar custom as a narrative device impacts the text.