Are you looking for a spooky read? Let’s see what I’ve got… I’ll be showcasing my work through the month of October! Buy links are at the top and bottom of the post! This one is an anthology of fictional folklore and urban legends from Pagham-on-Sea, East Sussex, and I’ll be doing a couple of posts about this as we go.
Contents:
The Meteor Strike
Jenny, Jennet and Pinnie-Pen
The Greenlad, or, The Girl Who Saw Herself
Farisee Stones
The Neo-Eleusinians
The Punch and Judy Man of Hangman’s Walk
Some of these can be read on my blog already, in their original forms. It’s only 99p so if you’d like to own them all as an eBook, all the creepy stories in one handy place, you can grab it from a variety of stores or directly from my Ko-Fi shop. If you get it from my Ko-Fi, I get all 99p rather than 20-30p royalties so I’d selfishly encourage you to do that if you can!
The Meteorite Strike
This one was inspired by translations of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. The British Library gives an example of the style:
Ann. dccxciii. Her pæron reðe forebecna cumene ofer norðhymbra land . 7þæt folc earmlic bre?don þætpæron ormete þodenas 7li?rescas . 7 fyrenne dracan ?æron ?ese?ene on þam lifte fleo?ende . þam tacnum sona fyli?de mycel hun?er . 7 litel æfter þam þæs ilcan ?eares . on . vi . id. ianr . earmlice hæthenra manna her?unc adile?ode ?odes cyrican in Lindisfarna ee . þurh hreaflac 7 mansliht . 7 Sic?a forthferde . on . viii . kl. martius.
Year 793. Here were dreadful forewarnings come over the land of Northumbria, and woefully terrified the people: these were amazing sheets of lightning and whirlwinds, and fiery dragons were seen flying in the sky. A great famine soon followed these signs, and shortly after in the same year, on the sixth day before the ides of January, the woeful inroads of heathen men destroyed god’s church in Lindisfarne island by fierce robbery and slaughter. And Sicga died on the eighth day before the calends of March.
British Library Transcript and Translation ~ https://www.bl.uk/learning/timeline/item126532.html
This story is supposedly taken from a medieval chronicle written by one of the monks of Beaubois Abbey [Fairwood Abbey] in the twelfth century and translated by Harry Bishop, one of the characters in THE CROWS.
I mimicked the style of a 1970s translation of a medieval text, and used it to play with some local myths. This story talks about three local saints, and I might use their martyr legend later for something else, but this is primarily a werewolf-origin tale! It also introduces the concept of the farisee stones, or fairies’ stones, but gives a medieval Christian interpretation of their origins.
You can read the meteorite story on my blog as a taster, if you’d like to!
A lovely, hyperlocal, folkloric mini-collection to lead into the author’s novel, The Crows.
5 star Goodreads Review & Verified Amazon Purchase
I enjoyed reading this book. This was the first time that I’ve read Gothic fiction and I enjoyed it. The prose is great and so are each of the folk stories within the book. There are some great twists within it and I was engaged throughout as I read. The format of the stories (poetry, diary entries, etc) was great too and so was how Rosens wrote from the POV of the characters of the stories (sometimes first person, sometimes third person, but always done well).
5 star Verified Amazon Purchase
Rosens did a great job!
C. M. Rosens 
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