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 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 ~ introduced in a previous post!
Jenny, Jennet and Pinnie-Pen ~ introduced in a previous post!
The Greenlad, or, The Girl Who Saw Herself ~ introduced in a previous post!
Farisee Stones ~ introduced in a previous post!
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 Neo-Eleusinians
This one is prefaced by an extract from Harry Bishop’s book, Fairwood House: A History (1987) that Carrie reads in THE CROWS Chapter 6. It’s followed by extracts from Peter Sauvants journals, found by Carrie in the house, and edited by the local History Society after the events of that novel.
I was thinking a lot about weird nineteenth-century cults and occult practices, and listening to some dodgy weird fiction from its late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century heyday, and basically wrote a parody of that in which the preoccupations of sexually-repressed/sex-obsessed men come out in very odd and gruesome ways.
I wanted it to be affectionately bad Weird fiction, so the ending is as subtle as a brick to the face and then just sort of ends there, with a mysterious, disembodied penis flopping about on the floor.
This is also an origin story for the hyper-fertile soil which has the power of resurrection, and is referenced in THE CROWS Chapter 6.
It’s basically inspired by that, and classic Hammer Horror films.
You can read a version of it for free here.
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!
