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 Meteorite Strike ~ introduced in a previous post!
Jenny, Jennet and Pinnie-Pen ~ introduced in a previous post!
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 Greenlad, or, The Girl Who Saw Herself
This story was based on a dream I had when I was about ten or eleven about a pale, grey/silver-skinned boy on an altar of stone beneath the church, lashing out at us with his long nails, and it stuck with me a lot. It’s based on that dream, just with a different local setting and a deliberate link to a saint’s day (the saint that the fictional parish church is dedicated to). I added in a few more things, like medieval green children tales (e.g. the Green Children of Woolpit, Suffolk), and death omen superstitions.
The green children were always unsettling to me when I read those stories as a kid; there was something unbearably sad and melancholy about them, and I felt that vibe lent itself to a creepy folktale about a plucky girl facing mortality.
This one is heavy on the dialect as well, but the Sussex Dialect Dictionary can be found here. It should be easy enough to work out from context: this one, unlike Jenny, Jennet and Pinnie-Pen, doesn’t have a glossary at the end.
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 