Before we start, two quick thoughts:
I am loving the output of Rough Trade Books. Who owns them? I hope it’s actually independent. Geoff Travis seems a little dodgy? He is probably really famous and someone I should know of. They are publishing some really interesting books. I’ll look into them more later.
Whenever I see something like this book, I have:
1. A great sense of excitement for magical things that deserve reverence
2. A yearning for a world where monotheism hadn’t colonised almost everything
3. I hear a faint alarm bell and want to check that the art doesn't present fanaticism or supremacism as nostalgia and tradition.
The Pin Jar is a love letter to folklore, mythology, place and dialect. Reid uses a brilliant framing device (an ethnographer reflecting on his career collecting stories and his marriage) to transition between short stories. The ethnographer listens to tape recordings and explains inaccuracies in the transcription, unnatural pickups, tones of voice and the like. In his reflections he also describes settings of hidden towns, old pubs, bad weather and odd characters- primarily the ones which tell the tales that comprise The Pin Jar.
The actual tales, in order to better reflect the rhythm of oral storytelling, are written in verse. This is a great choice as it allows the words to breathe on the open page and Reid is adept at using blank verse to dictate pace. This allows him to better capture the Sussex dialect and creates a musicality that carries the work forwards. He interrupts the verse with clarifying prose from the transcriber as he inserts explanations of what is happening, the body movements of the storytellers and more.
The work is definitely folk-horror, and the tales are full of the supernatural, ghosts, magic, and more, but my head has filed the book in the “folklore” over the “horror” category. The Pin Jar is presented as a “story cycle” and I am excited to reread it and let these stories sink into my bones a little deeper.