Fox Hunt: A Creature Feature Horror – Charles E. P. Murphy – Review

Fox Hunt: A Creature Feature Horror

Charles E P Murphy

A couple of years ago, there was a brief period of time where a group of horror authors had a sort of competition to see what sort of strange, unusual and exotic animals they could turn into the stars of a Creature Feature horror novels. There were some amazing entries, perhaps the best of which was Alan Baxter’s The Roo, in which Baxter masterfully turned the beloved national animal of Australia, the humble Kangaroo, into a bloodthirsty killing machine that slaughtered the inhabitants of a remote town. It’s a superb slice of horror that’s brilliantly written, and I need to get around to reviewing it sooner rather than later.

However when I was reading The Roo and those inspired by it, there was always something nagging at the back of my mind about it; and more specifically, the scenario that book is based around. Of course, Kangaroos are in many ways a perfect animal to be the antagonist of a creature feature novel: they’re fast, powerful and heavily-muscled, and territorial to boot. But they’re also only in specific parts of Australia, primarily the rural and more isolated parts of the country, and you effectively have to go looking for them in order to find them. But what about creatures that you don’t have to go looking for; ones that are everywhere around you and which you see almost every day. Creatures that you couldn’t flee from because you might just bump into them where ever you went?

There are some classic examples of them in the Horror genre – classics like James Herbert’s The Rats (and its lesser-known sequels) and Night of the Crabs by Guy N. Smith, as well as newer titles such as William Meikle’s terrifying Crustaceans. All titles where the titular creatures are so numerous that when they turn against humanity, they’re drowned under a storm of pincers and biting jaws. But what about a creature that is both numerous, always in close proximity to humans, and is also indelibly associated with Britain, in the same way that the Kangaroo is with Australia?

Enter the humble fox – and more specifically, the red fox: vulpes vulpes. Over the past few decades they’ve gone from something solely seen in the countryside, darting through bushes and around trees, into a species that has been forced to migrate into towns and cities across Britain as their natural habitats have been destroyed. For many Brits like myself, seeing a fox dart across the road in the face of a pair of car headlights, or rifling through an overturned black bin, has become as natural a sight as the bin lorry picking up those same bins, or endless queuing as roads deteriorate under our vehicles. In London alone, there are more than ten thousand foxes across the capital, and usually they’re more afraid of us than we are of them.

But what if that changed?

Enter Charles E. P. Murphy’s Fox Hunt: A Creature Feature Horror. Murphy is an author I’ve reviewed here on the blog, most recently with his superb black comedy/kaiju rampage novella Kaiju Time Slip, and I have a lot of time for him. In fact I think he’s one of the best up-and-coming British horror authors I’ve read across the genre, and with each story of his I read I’m impressed with how her’s improved his craft, both as an author and as a composer of horror fiction. As such, I was eager to see what Fox Hunt would deliver – particularly when the back-cover blurb highlighted that this story wouldn’t take place in some isolated rural village or town at the edges of the United Kingdom; but would instead be centered directly within London, one of the largest and densely-populated capital cities in the entire world, and with perhaps the largest concentration of urban foxes in the UK. The blurb whet my appetite, but it was nothing compared to the amazing piece of cover art that Murphy had commissioned for the novel. It’s by legendary horror writer Kelan Patrick Burke and perfectly captures both the grimy, unsettling nature of 2020’s London as a setting, and harks back to the ‘Creature Feature’ novel covers and VHS covers from the 1960s and 1970s. It’s gorgeous, unsettling and couldn’t be more perfectly matched to Murphy’s writing.

As with the best Creature Feature stories, the overarching plot for Fox Hunt is nice and simple: London has tens of thousands of foxes living behind overflowing rubbish bins and inside dumpsters and the few remaining hedges to be found within the capital, and until now they’ve been content to remain on the fringes of human society, forced into a parasitic relationship where they’ve become reliant on feeding on food waste and living in unnatural conditions as their natural habitats have been torn apart by the rampant late-stage capitalism devouring the countryside. But then something strange and unnatural and weird happens, and those very same foxes begin to turn the tables on the harassed, overworked and underpaid population of London.

What begins with scattered incidents of horrifically-savaged human bodies being found across the capital, soon escalates into a full-scale assault by hordes of foxes who begin hunting down and savagely tearing apart every human they can find. As the capital’s population flee from the corpse-riddled streets into apartment buildings and shops, they find themselves under siege from an entire species no longer content to remain in the shadows; their only hope an understaffed, underfunded police force and an equally skeletal military that scrambles to keep up with the tide of blood-soaked foxes sweeping through the streets.

The above might sound a little hyperbolic, and if so that’s entirely the result of my writing, rather than Murphy’s. Because while it might initially seem strange for the eponymous Basil Brush to suddenly be massacring anything walking on two legs, Murphy quickly and deftly dispels any notions of these foxes being even vaguely related to that beloved puppet. These foxes are vicious, territorial killing machines that move lighting-fast and hunt in packs that can swarm even groups of armed police in a matter of moments, biting and gouging and aiming for weak spots in an orgy of violence. Murphy’s characterization of the foxes is brilliantly-written, taking the natural abilities of vulpes vulpes and dialling them up to 11 in the best traditions of the Creature Feature subgenre; and using that as inspiration to pen scenes that made even this jaded veteran of the horror genre feel queasy and disturbed. The writing and plotting are fast-paced, with Murphy developing a sparse, staccato style of writing that perfectly suits this style of horror novel, ensuring that there’s no extraneous padding or bloat that distracts the reader. The back-cover blurb and cover art promise death by fox – and Murphy delivers that in spades. No character is safe, and there’s definitely no such thing as plot armour – several times characters that I thought might become protagonists were brutalised and torn apart in a flurry of red fur, and I found myself sympathizing with the remaining characters as they feared for their lives.

If the murderous foxes were the only element of this horror novel, then it would still be an excellent slice of creature-based horror. But in my eyes at least, what escalates Fox Hunt from merely excellent horror to sublime horror is the manner in which Murphy situates the killer animals into the nature of being a citizen of Britain in 2024. For the revolt by the foxes merely slots them in as the most immediately-concerning issue facing those of us living in a country brutalized by decades of austerity, unable to escape the realities of a country gripped in the throes of managed decline and late-stage capitalism. Murphy’s protagonist,s and those surrounding them, are already living in a horror novel; except instead of killer foxes, the horrors they face don’t kill them anywhere near as quickly or mercifully. Instead they’re ground down by depressed wages that force them to get second and third jobs, surrounded by overstretched public services and defunded police forces, public transport that barely functions, and rampant late-stage capitalism that causes ridiculously-high rent payments and governments that have spent decades deliberately running the public sector into the ground for the sole benefit of private shareholders.

Fox Hunt: A Creature Feature Horror is a multi-layered horror novel that has a huge amount to offer the prospective reader. It’s a superb piece of well-written, perfectly paced Creature Feature horror that continues the tradition of Herbert, Smith, Meikle and Baxter and which serves up as much blood, gore and torn-out throats that fans of the subgenre could ever hope for. Yet at the same time, the novel also operates on a far deeper and much more radical level. Fox Hunt is as much about the horrors of the breakdown of social capital and the crimes of rampant, uncontrolled capitalism that has devastated Britain in the 21st Century as it is about murderous foxes; and Murphy delivers a keen-eyed critique of the unsettling state of Britain as it stumbles its way through the second decade of this new century. And for those reasons, and the many others I’ve listed above, Fox Hunt deserves – nay, demands – to be read by anyone interested in horror: whether it be the horror of fox-based murder, or the murder of society by late-stage capitalism.