Hag: Forgotten Folktales Retold

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There's nothing wrong with this story, but it didn't particularly excite or amuse me, hence my rating. John Giffard collects exotic animals and brings them to his house in Chillington Hall. 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.

I’ve always loved how folktales weave the ordinary and magical world together. Fairytales can often feel out of reach; this happened to a princess in a castle far away. But with folktales there is a commonplace, local element; this happened to a miller up the lane. I imagine when these tales were originally told, combining sprites, giants, merfolk (and in the case of my tale, a panther) within the local setting would not only have made it feel as if these things could happen, but they could happen to you. In the modern era, retelling these stories has a particularly alluring appeal as elements that were often excluded in the original versions – the point of view of women, for example – can add extra layers previously missed. Within every folktale there is a warning, and it’s interesting to see how these elements can differ when written from different perspectives as well as what elements remain the same. But essentially it is the magic within the ordinary that I feel we are drawn to and can look out for in our own lives, no matter what our age. Within these magical, ingenious stories lies all of the angst, horror and beauty of adolescence. A brilliant achievement." (Evie Wyld)I did not like the story or the characters or anything else about it. It is also heavy on infidelity which I am not a great fan of. However, the writing was not bad. About a princess who is bound to a loveless marriage to a prince (by magic) and is cursed to be a panther. It had magic, dreams, Goddess Kali and a good story. As I have said that some of these were good but the majority didn't work for me. And these should come with trigger warnings. Overall, Hag is a successful endeavour, in that it brushes the dust off some excellent British and Irish folklore. As professor Carolyne Larrington, the expert who wrote the introduction and chose the stories, says, ‘the last fifty years have seen a remarkable upsurge of interest in Britain’s traditional imaginary’. As recent examples she cites Max Porter, Sarah Hall and Helen Oyeyemi. Clearly folktales are having a moment, one which we can only expect to continue. One likes to think that dredging more tales to the present might inspire some of the writers featured in Hag– or those reading it – to explore the source material deeper. After uprooting her life, Irene Steele has just settled in at the villa on St. John where her husband Russ had been living a double life. But a visit from the FBI shakes her foundations, and Irene once again learns just how little she knew about the man she loved. Irene and her sons try to get on with setting up their new lives while evidence mounts that the helicopter crash that killed Russ may not have been an accident.

To bring these stories to a new modern audience is quite a feat by all these authors. They have all taken the essence of the original and moulded and shaped it to a contemporary context. There was the odd outstanding one, in particular, I liked both the Panther’s Tale and Holloway. In a similar way to Zhang’s Wild West tiger, I hoped to incorporate the impossible in my retelling of the Giffard legend. I decided the panther of my tale was actually a cursed Indian princess who had the ability to shape-shift in and out of animal form. Although it was a creation of my imagination, the panther princess’s story seemed to reveal truths about exoticism and fear of the ‘foreign’, as well as the hubris of wealth and the treatment of women not only at the time, but in the depiction of them in traditional folktales and fairy tales that still affect us today. To change the narrative felt empowering, which is part of the beauty and allure of fiction. While enthralling audiences with tales of spiders, panthers and tigers, storytellers have the ability to connect to something deeper. And perhaps, through animal impossibilities, they can truly reveal to us what it means to be human. In Failosophy Elizabeth Day brings together all the lessons she has learned, from conversations with the guests on her award-winning How to Fail podcast, from stories shared with her by readers and listeners, and from her own life, and distils them into seven principles of failure. One of the things that appeals to me most about folktales is their deep connection to local histories of place and landscape. When the Yorkshire folktale, Aye, We’re Flittin’, was shared with me, I was reintroduced to the word ‘boggart’. I’d encountered this word in place names in the north of England—the Boggart Stones on Saddleworth Moor, and Boggart Hole Clough in Manchester, for instance. I’d known these boggarty places, but I’d never heard the associated tales of boggarts tormenting households. I decided to set my own tale on the moortops of the Calder Valley, an area that has a long association with boggarts. Working with this tale enabled me re-visit and write about a place that I know well with a new aliveness to its past. That is not to say that these stories are by any means weaker or more predictable for having their authors’ hallmarks. In fact these three were my favourites of the collection, balancing as they did a contemporary update of the tale and the writer’s personal flourishes, while also maintaining a clear connection to the original.Surprising, gorgeously written, and profoundly unsettling, this genderfluid retelling of Oedipus Rex will sink into your bones and stay there." (Carmen Maria Machado) The death of a ninety-year-old woman with a heart condition should absolutely not be suspicious. DS Harbinder Kaur certainly sees nothing to concern her in carer Natalka’s account of Peggy Smith’s death. But when Natalka reveals that Peggy lied about her heart condition and that she had been sure someone was following her…And that Peggy Smith had been a ‘murder consultant’ who plotted deaths for authors, and knew more about murder than anyone has any right to…And when clearing out Peggy’s flat ends in Natalka being held at gunpoint by a masked figure…Well then DS Harbinder Kaur thinks that maybe there is no such thing as an unsuspicious death after all. A Song for the Dark Times by Ian Rankin