_{Review by Robert Welbourn, author of The Ones We Fear.}

City Obscura, Jen Farr’s wonderful collection of eclectic short fiction, is a thrill ride through the delights – and horrors – of a fictionalised version of the very real city of Hull in the north of England. The stories range from a Stephen King-esque tale of two siblings named after Shakespearean characters using magic to reincarnate their deceased father to a man, driven to despair by his low paid call centre job, learning to live happily with the ghost haunting his flat, and so much more in between.

Like the best gothic horror, Farr uses this sense of place to evoke powerful emotions in the reader. Whilst all the stories are set in Hull, the specific locations reinforce this sense of place even more firmly; It’s Me…Remember? employs the famous city centre minster as a place where time doesn’t work as it should in the outside world, and the main character finds themselves on the edges of society because of this. A Study in Torment sees Hull’s exceptional university as the setting for a visiting Finnish professor haunting a Hull-based scientist, who’s distracted from their research by trying to figure out why the Finn seems a little…off.

One of the strongest aspects of this book is that Farr doesn’t limit herself by genre, or even place; whilst Hull is ostensibly the setting, Love Me, Phantom sees characters using astral projection to visit Colorado, and The Asrai Invasion involves a non-human society dwelling at the bottom of a river. Farr uses varying genres, including classic horror, science fiction, and weird fiction, but again she isn’t strictly bound by the tenets of these genres, and the way she plays with boundaries really helps make this book such a fantastic read.

Farr’s themes vary wildly too; she invokes class across all the stories, using the contrasting backgrounds of characters to emphasise the strong sense of conflict the stories in this collection posses. Farr tackles LGBTQ+ themes with wonderful tact, using same-sex relationships not as the outlier but as the norm, presenting LGBTQ+ characters as the humans they are, people who, just like her straight characters, have their own battles to face and their own demons to conquer. Sometimes almost literally, as in the final story Vermillion.

As a Hull-native, having been born and raised in the city, I found this collection a wonderful evocation of my home city. There were times when I felt a wonderful sense of peace walking familiar streets with unfamiliar characters, seeing places I know and have visited many times being used in ways alien to reality. But you don’t need to be from Hull, or even to have visited, to enjoy this collection. Farr’s writing is so colourful and creative that she could be writing about a completely fictional place known to no one, and it would still feel familiar. Farr is a powerful talent, as evidenced in all the stories in this collection, and no matter who you are, where you’re from, or what your preferred genre of reading is, you’ll find a home within these pages.

City Obscura is available to buy now.