PAUL M CLARK The Witchfinder’s Mark. Reviewed by Amelia Dudley
Paul M Clark employs the tropes of ‘folk horror’ in this tale of a 16th-century witchfinder.
Samuel was the most experienced witchfinder north of London. Until he’d met Douglass. Now he felt like an infant learning how to walk. Trying to find the courage to take one unsteady step after another. Only sheer ignorance prevented him from understanding the consequences of falling over.
In Paul M Clark’s debut novel, Samuel Hawke, a sixteenth-century pseudo-witchfinder, gets what he deserves when he accidentally manages to find a pair of actual witches. Tempted by the prospect of having enough money to retire on, he travels to the village of Beckborn in Lancashire to secure the convictions of 15-year-old twins Mary and Elizabeth Chancel.
The entire village is terrified of them and Samuel soon learns why. His life is turned upside down and a real witchfinder has to rescue him. There is no turning back from the knowledge that the evil Samuel once pretended to bring to justice is real and will now not stop hunting him until either he or the twins are dead. As he tries to find the two girls again before they find him and end things one way or another, the English Civil War between the Royalists and Parliamentarians spreads to Lancashire. Navigating the chaos sees Samuel put his talent for lying to good use.
Samuel’s guilt over his career, which he acknowledges is dishonest, involving as it does persecuting innocent women, almost but not quite humanises him. Few books manage to make the main character so immediately detestable but this one does so very effectively. We gradually learn more of Samuel’s tricks of the trade to ‘prove’ the guilt of little old ladies with too many cats and too few teeth living outside society. It is particularly amusing how Samuel initially cannot believe that the witchfinder who saves him could be doing it for no personal gain and simply to save a life. Just how the author keeps the reader engaged by Samuel is cleverly done.
There are a few good moments for feminism which I won’t spoil. The author’s wry sense of humour also comes through quite often:
A reluctant grunt of acknowledgement came from Douglass. [Samuel] was developing an understanding of the man’s different grunts.
The author even manages to make exhuming a body somewhat amusing:
The two men drew deep gulps of air on the short walk back to the Moorland Inn. Neither could speak … The odour of death clung to their clothes and their skin and their hair. The constable held on to his [special, lavender-scented] handkerchief and Samuel did not have it in him to ask for it back.
On his website, Paul Clarke talks about his fascination with ‘folk horror’, which he defines as stories characterised by isolated communities, skewed belief systems, and ‘some kind of event/happening that results in terrible outcomes’.
All these elements are present in The Witchfinder’s Mark. I’m quite squeamish, but I found the premise of this novel so intriguing that I endured the gorier aspects of the story. The descriptions of the pseudo-witchfinder’s methods – and the way the actual witches toy with their victims – are a bit more graphic and more frequent than one might find in fantasy works with a dark bent such as The Witcher series by Andrzej Sapkowski or the Night Angel trilogy by Brent Weeks.
I enjoyed it as a character study and for the story, but I did skim some elaborate torture scenes. This is not a book for the faint-hearted.
The Witchfinder’s Mark is a fun and impressive debut. Just don’t read it alone at night.
Paul M Clark The Witchfinder’s Mark Brio Books 2022 PB 320pp $29.99
Amelia Dudley has degrees in plant biology and currently works as a tutor.
You can buy The Witchfinder’s Mark from Abbey’s at a 10% discount by quoting the promotion code NEWTOWNREVIEW or you can buy it from Booktopia.
You can also check if it is available from Newtown Library.
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