Audiobook Review // The Haar by David Sodergren

I went looking for some contemporary folk horror, and somehow, social media kept throwing The Haar by David Sodergren at me. It popped up often enough that eventually I thought, fine, I'll give the bloody thing a go. What I didn't expect was to enjoy it quite as much as I did.

I listened to The Haar on Audible and, honestly, this was pretty much exactly what I was looking for. Folk horror? Yep. Body horror? Oh bloody hell, yes. Gore? Loads of it. A weird, emotional story about an elderly Scottish woman falling in love with an ancient creature from the sea? Sure why not?

The Story

The story follows Muriel, an elderly woman living in a small Scottish coastal village. Unfortunately, her little corner of the world is slowly being destroyed. A greedy businessman and his corporation are buying up the village with plans to demolish it and replace it with something far more profitable.

Muriel is watching her home, community and way of life disappear around her. Then something washes up on the shore, and when I say something, I mean something. This strange creature has existed for an incredibly long time and is essentially a huge, ancient, slimy mess of something that is very definitely not human.

Muriel discovers it, and from that point onwards, her life changes forever.

Muriel and Billy

The relationship between Muriel and the creature, who she ultimately will name Billy, is probably the thing that surprised me most about this book. Going in, I expected folk horror, gore and some nasty creature-based horror. I wasn't necessarily expecting the story to become so intimate and emotional. But it does.

There is a genuine romantic element to Muriel and Billy's relationship, and somehow Sodergren makes it work. It's strange. It's very uncomfortable, and it's occasionally bloody disgusting. But it's also surprisingly sweet. You genuinely start caring about these two. You want them to be left alone. You want Muriel to have some happiness after everything that's been taken from her, and that emotional connection makes some of the more extreme moments hit considerably harder.

Body Horror Done Right

Now we're getting into the good stuff, the creature! The descriptions of Billy's physical appearance are fantastic if you're a fan of body horror. This thing is bizarre. Slimy, strange, ancient and completely alien. Sodergren does a great job of making you picture something that feels familiar enough to understand but utterly wrong at the same time, and then we have the deaths. Oh, the deaths. There are some wonderfully nasty sequences in this book, with the violence and gore reaching some pretty extreme levels. But what I particularly enjoyed was how alien some of it feels. It's not just violence for violence's sake. The creature doesn't necessarily behave according to human expectations, and that makes some of the scenes fascinating as well as disgusting. Which, let's be honest, is exactly what I wanted from a body-horror novel.

Muriel's World Falling Apart

One of the more interesting aspects of the story is what happens to Muriel as everything around her is stripped away. She's already lost her husband, Billy (years ago he was lost at sea as a fishman), she's now losing her closet friends, her community, and then the Grant Corporation is behind it all. The isolation is brutal, and we get to watch Muriel change as the story progresses. She becomes increasingly desensitised to the violence happening around her, and eventually the violence happening because of her. There's a fascinating question underneath all the gore about how much Muriel has already been damaged by everything she's lost. Is the creature giving her something to live for? Or is it simply allowing parts of herself that were already buried to come back out? I really liked that darker element.

The Villains

This is probably where the book lost me slightly. The corporate villains are…well…a little ridiculous. At times I half expected them to start twirling their moustaches while announcing their evil plans to the world. It's not necessarily a massive problem because they're really the background conflict to Muriel and Billy's story. But it did make them feel rather hollow.

After the opening section, I found myself caring less and less about the whole Grant Corporation conflict. Not because it wasn't important to the story, but because I was simply far more invested in Muriel and Billy. Give me more weird sea creature romance and less evil corporation any day (not a sentence I thought I would be writing today).

The Audiobook

The audiobook format worked really well for me. It's a relatively quick listen, which made it an easy book to get through, but it never felt like it was lacking in ideas, and because so much of the horror relies on descriptions of the creature, the violence and Muriel's changing state of mind, it translated nicely into audio. It's one of those listens where you can happily settle in for a session and suddenly realise you've chewed through a huge chunk of it.

Sector 102 Thoughts

And, of course, my brain immediately started asking: How the hell do I steal this for Sector 102? The obvious answer is the Cursed Earth fishing settlement. Imagine a tiny community somewhere along the flooded coast just outside Sector 102. A handful of mutant fishermen and old-timers have managed to carve out a living along the water. They've got their own little community, their own traditions and their own way of surviving. Then Kelp Pharmacy moves in. Suddenly the settlement is being bought up, surveyed and dismantled. Kelp doesn't care about the people living there. They're interested in what's underneath the water, what can be harvested, what biological material can be recovered and what secrets the settlement has been sitting on.

Then something washes ashore. Something ancient. Something that shouldn't be there. Something that the fishermen might have known about for generations, and suddenly Kelp isn't just dealing with a bunch of stubborn mutants. They're dealing with something from the deep.

I love that. Now that's a Sector 102 adventure I'd happily play.

Final Thoughts

Overall, I really enjoyed The Haar. It was quick, nasty, weird and surprisingly emotional. The body horror and gore were exactly what I was looking for, but it was the relationship between Muriel and Billy that really made the story work for me. It's not often you get extreme body horror mixed with a genuinely emotional love story, but somehow Sodergren pulls it off.

Most importantly, The Haar has done exactly what I wanted it to do. It got me more interested in contemporary folk horror, and that's always a good sign.

Now I just need to work out whether Sector 102 needs a creepy fishing village…

The answer is of course yes.