the ghastling: book twenty

In ’Faun’ by N.J. Carré, a woman living alone in a neighbourhood plagued by antisocial behaviour has a strange synergy with a creature she encounters in the woodlands by her house. Terrified, she begins to think the faun is sent to protect her somehow...’A Grave for a Dead Horse’ by J.P. Relph, the allure of a swinging rope hung above a deep pit is tempting for a group of early teens with nothing much else to do. But the game goes horribly wrong for one member of the party. Another macabre children’s game (they often are, aren’t they?) leads these sadistic revellers to discover something far worse: Cheryl, the quiet friend, (because there’s always one) is perhaps a little too quiet and a little too willing in this very creepy tale, ’Stacking Coffins’ by Josh Hanson. Ava DeVries’ story, ’Only Carrion’, is a dark and brooding exploration of death and mortality. A woman receives visitations from birds after her miscarriage, and then, every time there is a death, a ’wake’ of vultures begin to close in... In ’Tear-Sippers’ by Vonnie Winslow Crist, professor Floella Greer, an ambitious academic and expert in lepidoptera - in particular the variety of Tear-Sipping moths. Determined to forge ahead with her research plans despite the interventions of the misogynistic Professor Bogdan, she does something rather unethical to get her way... We’ve all coveted, cherished something belonging to a beloved relation. But what if it was really a part of them? In this eerie tale, a young woman inherits much more than a simple object, in Isobel Leach’s ’My Grandmother’s Glass Eye’. It is summertime in a seaside town, the light shimmers and Billy loves Laurel. Everything is almost perfect, almost. But laurel has a strange and occasional habit of disappearing - just not in the way you might think in Fiona Cameron’s story, ’Freaks’. On a miserable corner of the coastline, two old friends, Daniel and Bramble, meet to chat on a dilapidated bench overlooking the sea. But Bramble has the sensation he is being watched (pursued?) by a figure in a yellow raincoat, a figure sent to remind him of something he’d rather forget in Tom Preston’s tale, ’Bramble’. In Timothy Fox’s folk horror, ’Listening Wood’, a young boy, raised by his father, haunted by the legend of his mother, keeps returning to the woods where she was found.