Hag: Forgotten Folktales Retold

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I had varying degrees of familiarity with the original folktales the stories were based on, but I don't feel this affected my enjoyment of any of the pieces. There is a consistent unsettling thread woven through all of the tales, as well as strong feminist tones, and this lent to the collection' This one is heavy on religion, possession and exorcism so, if that's not for you, skip it! I honestly really enjoyed reading this one. It was subtly creepy, little shivers down your spine rather than big jump scare moments. The writing style was great and, weirdly, Kathleen's character was so fun to read. London, 1938. Alma Fielding, an ordinary young woman, begins to experience supernatural events in her suburban home. Nandor Fodor – a Jewish-Hungarian refugee and chief ghost hunter for the International Institute for Psychical research – begins to investigate. In doing so he discovers a different and darker type of haunting: trauma, alienation, loss – and the foreshadowing of a nation’s worst fears. As the spectre of Fascism lengthens over Europe, and as Fodor’s obsession with the case deepens, Alma becomes ever more disturbed. This was weirdly metafictional, a story of how this particular story came about, but with supernatural features of said story taking place in the real world. I don't have an easier way to describe it! I liked the elements of magical realism; this story really reminded me of Sue Rainsford's Follow Me To Ground. After uprooting her life, Irene Steele has just settled in at the villa on St. John where her husband Russ had been living a double life. But a visit from the FBI shakes her foundations, and Irene once again learns just how little she knew about the man she loved. Irene and her sons try to get on with setting up their new lives while evidence mounts that the helicopter crash that killed Russ may not have been an accident.

Rosheen was born to a Trinidadian father and an Irish mother in Ireland's small County, Kerry. She'd never met her father and when she was all grown up, she leaves the town she grew up in to move to the big city and finds work on a secluded farm where the owner doesn't pay her much and got her to work tirelessly. When she demands her share of the money, she experiences something stranger, stranger than fiction as they say.Here are sisters fighting for the love of the same woman, a pregnant archaeologist unearthing impossible bones and lost children following you home. A panther runs through the forests of England and pixies prey upon violent men. The death of a ninety-year-old woman with a heart condition should absolutely not be suspicious. DS Harbinder Kaur certainly sees nothing to concern her in carer Natalka’s account of Peggy Smith’s death. But when Natalka reveals that Peggy lied about her heart condition and that she had been sure someone was following her…And that Peggy Smith had been a ‘murder consultant’ who plotted deaths for authors, and knew more about murder than anyone has any right to…And when clearing out Peggy’s flat ends in Natalka being held at gunpoint by a masked figure…Well then DS Harbinder Kaur thinks that maybe there is no such thing as an unsuspicious death after all. A Song for the Dark Times by Ian Rankin

Each Hag story has a woman either at its heart or close to it; women's friendships and their enmities, their power to give birth and to deal death, to harm and to heal thread their way through the narratives."~ from the preface She herself a stranger in the land before she had dreamt of the wide flat skies and horizons, the sprawling dappled green landscape, windmills dotted along the Broads' periphery spinning like moored gods. That is not to say that these stories are by any means weaker or more predictable for having their authors’ hallmarks. In fact these three were my favourites of the collection, balancing as they did a contemporary update of the tale and the writer’s personal flourishes, while also maintaining a clear connection to the original. follows a young girl and her brother who watch their father abuse their mother. The story is told from the perspective of the girl. The brother has got a good opportunity for college. He is hesitant of leaving but the mother insists. The story felt v real and almost not like it was reimagined from a folktale.It’s the most wonderful time of the year…but not for Maelyn Jones. She’s living with her parents, hates her going-nowhere job, and has just made a romantic error of epic proportions. I really liked the story in this one. By far, this was my favorite story but it had a slow start. I did like the twist and that ending made me so so sad. Dawn is a death doula, and spends her life helping people make the final transition peacefully. But when the plane she’s on plummets, she finds herself thinking not of the perfect life she has, but the life she was forced to abandon fifteen years ago – when she left behind a career in Egyptology, and a man she loved. But when they return home, reality hits. They’re both driven mad by each other’s weird quirks and annoying habits, from his eccentric, naked-sauna-loving family to her terribly behaved, shirt-shredding dog. As disaster follows disaster, it seems that while they love each other, they just can’t love each other’s lives. Can they overcome their differences to find one life, together? The Windsor Knot by S.J. Bennett

Logan treads familiar ground here -selkies and women giving birth to their children was an important element to her debut novel The Gracekeepers- but I love her writing so you don't hear me complain. I hope she publishes some new work soon. In a similar way to Zhang’s Wild West tiger, I hoped to incorporate the impossible in my retelling of the Giffard legend. I decided the panther of my tale was actually a cursed Indian princess who had the ability to shape-shift in and out of animal form. Although it was a creation of my imagination, the panther princess’s story seemed to reveal truths about exoticism and fear of the ‘foreign’, as well as the hubris of wealth and the treatment of women not only at the time, but in the depiction of them in traditional folktales and fairy tales that still affect us today. To change the narrative felt empowering, which is part of the beauty and allure of fiction. While enthralling audiences with tales of spiders, panthers and tigers, storytellers have the ability to connect to something deeper. And perhaps, through animal impossibilities, they can truly reveal to us what it means to be human. This is one of the more domestic ones, not rooted in fantasy or paranormal elements. The ending left me with this jaw-dropping feeling like my stomach had completely dropped. I didn't like Chlo as a person, but it was really interesting seeing the relationship between the sisters without them actually being close. Great storytelling. I wanted to love this, oh God, did I. It was Virago and it was a beautiful cover and it was Halloween… so I bought it. And now I have thoughts. This collection is unique and lends a voice to modern versions of folktales which remain memorable.Some might find the style McBride uses here overwrought ('she's trying too hard' is something that I can imagine some might say), but it worked very well for me. I loved the sly humour, and I like stories that involve the fair folk, so this was an absolute winner for me.