The Outcast and The Rite by Helen de Guerry Simpson

(Handheld Press, 2022)

Reviewed by Andy Sawyer

Helen Simpson, who died in 1940, was one of a number of extraordinary women in the interwar literary scene. She collaborated with Clemence Dane (later to be editor of the post-war science fiction line from Michael Joseph) on a number of detective novels. She was a member of the Detection Club, a group of fellow writers which also included Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers, and her friend Gladys Mitchell with whom she shared her lifelong interest in witchcraft and demonology.

The Outcast and the Rite, subtitled ‘Stories of Landscape and Fear’, brings together her outstanding supernatural stories mostly published in the 1925 collection The Baseless Fabric. Expertly curated with an informative introduction by Melissa Edmundson, it highlights Simpson as a remarkable writer who approached the task of writing supernatural fiction with a fresh eye and an unsettling imagination.

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Review from BSFA Review 19 - Download your copy here.