Hag: Forgotten Folktales Retold

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Gowar leaves it up to the reader to decide what is or isn't supernatural, but her adaptation of 'Old Farmer Mole' is chilling, violent and oddly hopeful. I enjoyed this collection, especially the stories, where bad men are put to a gruesome end, richly deserved. Vice Chair of the Royal Society of Literature, she was awarded an MBE For Services to Literature in 2021. We can’t know what Kathleen looked like, says the author, and so ‘we are, generally, at liberty to envisage her as we fancy’. When he captures a panther that reminds people of the devil himself, things turn out to be even more magical than they could have imagined.

An entertaining collection of short stories, modern retellings of folk tales from all parts of the British Isles. 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. Some stories stayed within the old-fashioned setting of the originals, but I preferred the ones that updated the scenery and put a modern, forward-thinking twist on the plot. To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. There's nothing wrong with this story, but it didn't particularly excite or amuse me, hence my rating.We know tales that originated in Germany and Italy but not, with a few exceptions, those associated with our own towns and villages. I have loved Logan's writing ever since The Gracekeepers so it should be no surprise that this was a standout to me. Daisy Johnson starts Hag off with a story that poses the question at the heart of any retelling: Is it mine to tell? I have always enjoyed folktales but these feminist, contemporary retellings of forgotten British folktales were delectable!

But she transposes onto it the story of a woman who has been transformed into the panther, and in doing so mashes up traditional Indian storytelling with the Staffordshire legend. From the islands of Scotland to the coast of Cornwall, the mountains of Galway to the depths of the Fens, these forgotten folktales howl, cackle, and sing their way into the 21st century, wildly reimagined by some of the most exciting women writing in Britain and Ireland today. I'd absolutely recommend listening to this as well, but to not forego the joy of reading them first. Meanwhile Emma Glass’s ‘The Dampness Is Spreading’ approaches the tale of the fairy midwife by turning it into the story of an exhausted hospital worker haunted by grim thoughts, leaving us unsure what is real – much like her novel Rest and Be Thankful. While the stories are all told in vastly different ways, they all leave you with the feeling that maybe there is something more out there.You can change your choices at any time by visiting Cookie preferences, as described in the Cookie notice. Perhaps the latter is no bad thing if it brings us a new and exciting story, but for the former to be worth including in the collection, there ought to be some kind of twist. Overall, I thought this was a decent collection, though there were some stories that definitely are catered to a specific audience. When she demands her share of the money, she experiences something stranger, stranger than fiction as they say.