I Read Books: Lore And Disorder

Lore And Disorder

An anthology of folk fiction stories, taking folk in a broad sense and fiction in an even broader. To pick some highlights:

George Sandison’s The Mark Lane Society is a fun story about a group of London Underground workers who try to keep the uncanny from effecting the network. There’s some history, some folklore transplanted to the Tube, and some entertaining attempts to navigate the bureaucracy of TfL.

C B Blanchard’s The Devil’s Pit is about teenage girls and haunted spots, and the stories you tell. And how being a teenager sucks and maybe you fall in love with someone but you don’t know what that is because it’s the first time? I’m not saying this well, you should read it yourself!

Rym Kechacha weaves through a variety of fairy tales in The Crane Wife, bringing together strands from different centuries and countries. There are wishes and alchemy and greed and mercy all together, and a woman with the wings of a bird.

But there are other bits, each of them in parts both strange and familiar. Many very English, others less so, some welcoming, others hostile. Magda Knight’s The Three Bastard Spirits Of Tanley Pond is an example of that, with the spirits insisting on rules, which cannot be written, and wanting to be left alone while requiring you to come to them.

Read This: For wildness and strangeness, often intruding on domestic settings
Don’t Read This: You have not even the slightest spark of a love of folklore in your soul
Available: Online for Pay What You Want , with the proceeds going to Fare Share UK, a food charity
Full Disclosure: Magda, one of the two editors is a pal who (re)published a poem by me; she is also a fine writer, editor and (now) anthologist so make of that as you will