The Dead of Summer -- Susan Price

The British Library just posted me a book.

The Dead of Summer

I won’t lie: it makes me feel sort of special to have a large, hard-backed and very handsome book posted to me by Britain’s National Library, the book-branch of the British Museum.

And what a gorgeous book! A glowing scarlet with gilt illustrations. As the sub-title says, it’s a collection of, ‘strange tales of May Eve and Midsummer.’

There is something eerie about those days, sunny though they might be. They’re two of the year’s great ‘turning days,’ linked to superstition, magic and myth for centuries beyond memory. The barriers between the worlds grows thin as smoke in mid-summer dusk as much as in mid-winter dark— and the hyacinth scent of massed bluebells is a dangerous thing. Never fall asleep in a bluebell wood, it's said. If you do, you won't wake in your own world or time.

The Dead of Summer’s editor, Johnny Mains, chose the stories from books in the British Library’s collection. The first story is Caroline Pichler’s ‘The First of May or Wallburga’s Night' dating from the Georgian period of 1823.

The last story is Jenn Ashworth’s ‘Heaven on Earth’ from 2020.

Foxglove: wikimedia

I got my copy because Mr Mains chose to include one of my stories, Foxgloves, which I’d all but forgotten. I read that story first, of course. I did dimly remember writing it in a hurry, to order, and feeling that it wasn’t all that good. On re-reading, after what must be at least twenty years, I was glad to find that it was nowhere near as bad as I feared.

I think I must have based it on the folk-tales of the ‘love-talker.’ That is, a sinister ‘fairy’ which appears as a handsome man to women walking alone — or as a lovely girl to lone men. They walk beside their victim, sweet-talking them, casting a spell.

The love-talker is hard to resist, but if you fall for them, if you kiss them (and that’s possibly a Victorian folk-lorist’s euphemism), then they vanish and leave you to pine away to a wraith with longing.

Having read my own story, I started reading the others, and it’s a cracking collection— well, look at the library Mr Mains had to choose from! It must be an eerie place itself, surely. You’d be afraid that if you poked your head round the corner of a shelf, you might catch Tutankamen browsing the archaeology section, or maybe Pete Moss in Natural History, checking up on marshland wildlife. 

Here’s a link to the British Library’s library of uncanny tales. I’ve read
several of them, which makes it particularly pleasing to find myself published in one. Whatever your taste in weird tales— whether it’s Polar Horrors, or terrifying dolls, unsettling romances or even ‘strange tales of the edible weird’ in ‘The Uncanny Gastronomic,’ you’ll find something here.