The Haar by David Sodergren is the kind of horror novella that earns its scares with atmosphere before it earns them with violence. Published by Horrified Press, this slim, precise piece of Scottish folk horror centres on the haar itself: the cold, dense sea fog that smothers the east coast of Scotland and the north of England, the kind that cuts visibility to five feet and makes the familiar world feel utterly replaced. Sodergren turns that meteorological fact into a vehicle for dread, and it works far better than it has any right to.
What the book is actually about
A group of friends rent a remote coastal cottage in the Scottish Highlands for a weekend getaway. Within the first few pages, Sodergren establishes the geography carefully: crumbling cliffs, a grey and restless sea, the nearest village a difficult drive away. When the haar rolls in and refuses to lift, the group finds itself cut off. Something is moving in the fog. People start disappearing. The premise is simple, but Sodergren trusts it completely, and that trust pays off.
The characters aren't deep. That's a real criticism worth sitting with. The group of friends follows recognisable horror-ensemble templates: the sensible one, the reckless one, the couple working through a crack in their relationship. Sodergren doesn't seem especially interested in complicating them, and the book loses something because of it. The emotional stakes depend on you caring whether these people survive, and the novella length (it reads in two or three hours) doesn't give the reader much time to invest.
Where Sodergren gets it right
The fog itself is the real protagonist. Sodergren writes the haar with a physical specificity that makes it feel genuinely menacing: the way it muffles sound, the way it distorts distance, the way it removes landmarks and leaves you uncertain which direction leads back to safety. Horror fiction lives or dies on whether the central threat feels real, and this one does. It doesn't explain the fog's nature or origin too quickly. The restraint is the point.
Fans of The Elementals by Michael McDowell will recognise the approach: an environment made hostile, a natural phenomenon weaponised, the creeping sense that the land itself is indifferent to survival. Sodergren isn't in McDowell's league as a prose stylist, but he understands that landscape-as-threat is a distinct and underused mode of horror, and he commits to it without hedging.
The pacing is almost faultless. Short chapters, clean cuts, no wasted motion. Sodergren doesn't pad. Each scene either raises the tension or deepens the fog's stranglehold on the setting, and the book never sags in the middle the way longer works often do. For a novella operating in a fairly crowded genre space, that discipline is genuinely impressive.
The horror tradition it draws from
The Haar sits in a specific lineage of British folk horror that treats the landscape as an active, malevolent participant in the story. Sodergren has clearly absorbed the rhythms of this tradition: the isolated community (or in this case the isolated visitors), the indifferent wilderness, the suggestion that certain places have a memory and a hunger. It's less concerned with the supernatural mechanics of what lives in the fog than with the psychological collapse that the fog produces. That's the right instinct.
The book doesn't entirely escape the pull of explicit violence. When the creature attacks do arrive, they're competently rendered but somewhat conventional. The novel is strongest when the threat is sensory and uncertain. It's weakest when it becomes concrete. That tension between suggestion and payoff is something horror novellas have always struggled with, and The Haar doesn't resolve it cleanly. What it does do is spend more time in the good mode than the lesser one. For readers drawn to The Croning by Laird Barron, where atmosphere carries most of the weight and explicit revelation would only diminish what's been built, The Haar scratches a similar itch, even if it doesn't reach those heights.
The Scottish setting as more than backdrop
Credit to Sodergren for grounding the book in a landscape he clearly knows. The haar is a real phenomenon. It rolls in off the North Sea and the Firth of Forth with a regularity that locals understand but visitors find disorienting. Using it as the engine of a horror story isn't a gimmick; it's a recognition that the coastline already generates its own low-level dread before any fiction is added to it. The cold, the grey, the sense of isolation from the rest of the country: these are real properties of this particular geography, and Sodergren uses them honestly.
Scottish horror fiction doesn't have the critical mass of output that American or even English horror does. That's partly why Horrified Press as a publisher matters, and why books like The Haar deserve attention from readers actively hunting for horror that isn't set in New England or the American South. The Scottish coast is genuinely frightening terrain. Sodergren is one of the writers making that case.
The verdict
The Haar by David Sodergren is a lean, effective piece of coastal folk horror that does more right than wrong. The setting is the book's greatest asset, and Sodergren deploys it with a confidence that belies the novella's short length. The characters are thin, and the more explicit horror sequences don't quite match the quality of the atmospheric passages that surround them. But it doesn't outstay its welcome, and the best sequences, alone in the fog, the landmarks gone, the sound swallowed, are genuinely frightening. Read it in a single sitting, preferably when it's grey outside.