Preamble
If you like mythologically informed (crime-adjacent) fiction, you can also check out my Dear Damsels story, ‘In Darkness’ as well as some of the stories in this collection, available on Bookshop.Org!
Review
This collection was published a few years again now, but I read it earlier this year, while the weather was still gloomy and the nights long. It feels like a good moment to review it, when the nights are now noticeably drawing in again!
The collection opens with a series of stories on a theme: sexual violence and women whose (male) Significant Others simply needed to go. Tiffany Murray’s ‘Song Fox’ is an unusual starting tale, preceding the Hazell Ward story that gives the collection its title. Like Katie Munnick’s ‘Hiraeth’, ‘Song Fox’ involves the incursion of the natural world and its disruption of human relationships, although the two female leads take very different approaches to the invasion when it comes. Further on, Alison Layland’s ‘Quirky Robbers’ makes defence of the natural world a perilous but unifying endeavour for a granddaughter-grandmother pair.
’Cast a Long Shadow’ and Maggie Himsworth’s ‘Play it for Me’ investigate the destructive force that can lurk within family relationships and their intergenerational consequences, while Ellen Davies’ ‘Simon Says’ and Delphine Richards’ ‘Growing Pains’ takes those same forces into the playground with fatal results. Julie Ann Rees’ ‘Jack and the Juniper Tree’ reconstitutes the traditional Brothers Grimm fairy tale of child abuse, combining it with Jack and the Beanstalk. Along with Sheila Kitrick’s ‘Street Theatre’, these stories play too with how revenge might be meted out, and this and the mythological theme are both picked up again by Louise Mumford’s ‘Stone’, where Medusa walks among us with a nose for retribution. ‘The Oba’s Head’, by Claire Boot, offers another take on cursed heads that bring forth justice, while Louise Walsh’s ‘Strike Weather’, which follows, riffs on the idea of bringing home stolen items of cultural significance, with a more farcical edge.
Caroline Stockford’s ‘Galata’ and Rachel Morris’ ‘The Cats of Riyadh’ take us further afield again, separated by Diana Powell’s ‘The Quiet’, which takes us into the deep centre of the wooded Welsh landscape to a scene that resists male invasion. Tracey Rhys’ ‘With Both Eyes Closed’ also looks at the perils inherent in pushing into an unknown landscape without invitation, and the fact that what seems abandoned or unused may still belong to someone. Meanwhile, pushing to the edge of the land, E.E. Rhodes’ ‘Pharricidal’ and Philippa Davies’ ‘Docked’ both take us to the seaside, with a lighthouse keeper and a teacher transgressing the social rules of their communities and using the sea to wash themselves clean.
Kittie Belltree’s ‘The Pigs in the Middle’ looks at the why of criminal infractions, which sometimes happen for the best of motives, bringing the divine retribution of ‘Stone’ and the self-defence of many of these stories to a rather more mundane setting but with a touching motivation for the crime. Finally, rounding off the collection, Eluned Gramich’s ‘The Ship’ circles back to the violence of men in the home.
See also
- The Snowdonia Killings (Simon McCleave)
- A Curtain Twitcher’s Book of Murder (Gay Marris) (see my review)
- Crimes of Cymru (ed. Martin Edwards) (see my review)
- The Lamplighters (Emma Stonex)
Take a look at my short story collection featuring Victorian “lady detective” Meinir Davies; order now!
Dominique Gracia 
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