Preview: ‘Thistlebone Book Three: The Dule Tree’ — Back To The Woods For More Horrors

by Richard Bruton

Every bit as full of folk horrors as what’s gone before, The Dule Tree takes us back to the woods, back to the nightmares, a brilliant thing where the fear will stay with you long after you put it down.

Since appearing in 2000 AD, Thistlebone has set a high bar for horror, and it’s one that continues into this third and final volume, revisiting the dark world of the woods around the quaint pastorally picturesque village of Harrowvale.

Here’s what 2000 AD have to say about this one…

‘After the death of Malcolm Kinniburgh, who had previously kept the Thistlebone legend alive, the local Harrowvale constabulary find clues that lead them to investigate the abandoned film production of a 1970s folk horror film, The Dule Tree.

Based on a harrowing account from the seventeen hundreds where thirteen innocent women and one man were hanged during the witch trials, the film itself ran into production problems, the source of which has remained a mystery for fifty years.’

Everything that made the first two volumes so good, so full of that lingering terror that just gets into your head, is here in this third volume. Eglington and Davis’s modern take on folk horror just never lets up, grabbing you and keeping hold.

It’s got all that slow build-up of the madness taking hold, as inevitable as you’d expect. But knowing it’s going to happen doesn’t make it any less unnerving, the build-up getting under your skin and infecting you with its madness as you read. And that starts right from the off, as we’re introduced to the story of the 1970s horror film through the eyes of one of its stars, many years on, but showing all that perfectly terrifying madness in her eyes even now…

That sets everything up for a quite magnificently dark and creeping tale of horrors and madness, one that plays out expertly, something in keeping with all that’s gone before.

Director Ben Wheatley described Thistlebone as ‘A fetid, brackish, wormy folk horror that will burrow under your skin and haunt you way after you have read it.’

Now that’s pretty much the perfect quote for Thistlebone, perfectly getting over the tone of this one, one of the best horror tales 2000 AD has done in many years.

This one’s every bit as dark and twisted and frankly brilliant as all that’s gone before. I’d say don’t have nightmares, but that’s not something that you can avoid with Thistlebone.

THISTLEBONE BOOK THREE – THE DULE TREE – BY TC EGLINTON AND SIMON DAVIS, LETTERS BY SIMON BOWLAND

PUBLISHED BY 2000 AD ON 4 JUNE 2025.