Curdle Creek by Yvonne Battle-Felton
Book Review by Kate Horsley
There are books that transport you, and then there are books that hurl you bodily through time and space, leaving you breathless and disoriented in the best possible way. Yvonne Battle-Felton’s Curdle Creek is decidedly the latter—a fever-dream odyssey that begins in an all-Black town governed by nightmarish traditions and spirals into something far more expansive and terrifying. At its heart is Osira, a forty-five-year-old widow whose “blessed” status crumbles spectacularly when life in Curdle Creek turns against her. Battle-Felton wastes no time establishing the suffocating atmosphere of this remote town, where a sinister “one in, one out” population policy and ritualistic ceremonies like the “Moving On” maintain an iron grip on residents —
“Missing a ceremony as important as the Warding Off is just plain unneighborly. It’s a good way to get yourself shunned. Being shunned is one step from being nominated, and being nominated is just as good as one foot hovering over the grave. Well, as being Moved On.”
When Osira’s children flee the harsh traditions described above and her father vanishes after his name is called, Osira finds herself stripped of everything that once protected her. As she navigates each new realm’s rules and restrictions, the central question haunts every page: can someone forever displaced ever truly find home? Battle-Felton offers no easy answers, but she provides something more valuable—a deeply unsettling exploration of how systems of control follow us across time and space —
“But it’s never too late for someone to change their mind. I’ve seen it happen too many times. People get comfortable just before. They start smiling when they should be frowning, frowning when they should be smiling. Getting ahead of themselves, thinking they’re bound to make it through this Moving On just as surely as they made it through the last one. Not me.”
Curdle Creek is not a comfortable read, nor should it be. It’s a book that will leave you examining the traditions and systems you’ve accepted without question, while delivering the kind of literary horror that lingers long after the final page. For readers seeking fiction that challenges, disturbs, and ultimately transforms, Battle-Felton has crafted something genuinely special—a haunting that you’ll carry with you across realms of your own.
What follows is a masterclass in surreal horror as Osira is forced to prove her allegiance by jumping into a well—only to tumble through realms and time itself. Each leap takes her further from home: first to answer for Curdle Creek’s collective sins, then into exile in rural England where kindness comes with devastating consequences. Battle-Felton excels at making each new realm feel both alien and achingly familiar, as Osira discovers that escape from one oppressive system often means landing in another.
Curdle Creek is an American gothic in the tradition of Shirley Jackson and bristles with the same mixture of wry social critique and creeping supernatural horror that Jackson is renowned for. But Battle-Felton pushes the gothic genre into much more trenchant territory, creating a spiritual sibling to Octavia E Butler’s Kindred or Parable of the Sower – reviewed in Inkfish by Amirah Walters – Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad, or Matt Ruff’s Lovecraft Country. At the same time, Battle-Felton’s book remains utterly singular: Osira’s distinctive and often sardonically comical voice absorb and guide the reader, leavening the tense and sinister with moments of sharply worked humour —
“’Isn’t that too much starch?’ Mae asks. As if dead people count calories.
‘I think it’ll be just fine,’ I say. ‘I’d imagine they burned off a lot when they passed – from the running.’”
This is American Gothic reimagined for our moment, where historical trauma and fantastical horror intertwine with devastating effect. With its ambiguous (and often downright sinister) characters and mysterious setting, Battle-Felton’s profound meditation on belonging, exile, and the price of survival keeps its readers constantly guessing. We highly recommend this unique and mind-bending novel!
Dr Yvonne Battle-Felton is an author, academic, host, creative producer, and writer. She won the Northern Writers Award in fiction in 2017. Remembered, her debut novel, was longlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction (2019) and shortlisted for the Jhalak Prize (2020). Yvonne has six children’s titles in Penguin Random House’s Ladybird series. Yvonne is Senior Commissioning Editor at John Murray where she publishes literary fiction. Inspired by Shirley Jackson’s The Lottery, Curdle Creek, Yvonne’s second novel, will be published November 2024 (Dialogue Books). Yvonne has an MA in writing (dual concentration fiction/creative nonfiction) from Johns Hopkins University and a Creative Writing PhD from Lancaster University where she has taught Creative Writing. As a researcher, she is interested in storytelling, the power of stories to build, develop, and heal communities, silences in narrative, stories as advocacy, and representation. She is a novelist, short story writer, and essayist.