Mists & Megaliths by Catherine McCarthy

 

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You can buy Mists & Megaliths............Here

You can follow Catherine McCarthy....Here

The Blurb....

Welcome to Wales, land of mists and megaliths, where mythical creatures and ancient spirits lurk in the strangest of places.
This collection of 10 supernatural stories offers a flurry of folklore, a gathering of ghosts, and even a cosmic cave creature.

Stories include...

Lure: A fisherman who nets the tail fin of a lure becomes obsessed with finding the rest, but what else lies hidden in the ancient lake?

Carreg Samson: A Neolithic burial chamber stares out to sea, remembering times long since past, but when it loses its heart of stone to a young girl the repercussions are hard to bear.

Coblynau: An old man watches the mountain which was once a slag heap of coal. He listens for the knock of the Coblynau, certain they will come for him... soon, just like they did to warn of the Aberfan disaster.

Author Catherine McCarthy’s second collection invites the reader on a regional journey, evoking a sense of quiet horror from the cosmic to the Gothic.

My Review...

This is a really good collection of short stories that give a real flavour of the dark, Celtic folklore of Wales and bring it into the modern era. A mini Mabinogion.

Horror really isn't my thing so was a tad wary of doing  a review for a horror book. However, this book is not so much horrific as supernatural/creepy.  Turns out that I really enjoyed this Welsh Twilight Zone. There are 10 terrifying tales, so there is sure to be something for everyone.

1. Gragen. A tale about a jealous sea spirit.

2. Two's company, threes a shroud. Comic claustrophobia in a grave.

3. Jagged Edges. The spirit of a railway man haunts a disused station.

4. Mara. What actually is a spirit box?

5. Retribution. When a village is turned to idol worship, And a monster is caged.

6. Ysbrid Y Mor. A stranger comes promising hope, do you let him in?

7. The Ice House. What we do in life echoes in the afterlife.

8. Lure. Who is fishing for who?

9. Corblynau. The mining trolls of Wales.

10. Carreg Samson. If the ancient standing stones could talk.

Each tale offers a little something a little different from the comedy of Two's company, to the foreboding of catastrophic karma of  Carreg Samson, to the moral tale of being a welcoming people in Ysbrid Y Mor.

What really comes through in the writing is a respect, awe and dare I say love for the ancient tales and locations of Wales. I have been to a few of the locations in the book. Namely the ice-house, Cefn Coed Cemetery, Porthgain and as a young lad swam in Cefn Golau pond next to the cholera graves. (Now having the read the ice-house, the fact that I swam there creeps me out a bit 😳.) She has chosen the locales very well, because having been there I can testify that they do, indeed, feel like "Thin Places." A Thin Place is where the dividing line between this world and the next is at its most shallow and can, on occasion, be breached. 

Aside from the creepiness of the tales, the writing can be powerful and gripping. In one section in particular in Corblynau the last miner in Wales is in a nursing home and suffering from dementia and the way the author writes about him is absolutely heart breaking.

There is also a short pre-amble before every tale, which gives a little background information and sets the scene. A nice touch and very informative.

This collection is a display of the dark, spiritual heritage of Cymru. As well as being ripping yarns in themselves they give you something to ponder about in your own lives afterwards.

Selected Quotes...

"If Charles were still able to give a derisory snort, he would have done so, but the cartilage in his nasal passages had long since decomposed."

"The end of the line. Or was it the beginning? Harold thought it depended entirely on one’s perspective."

"I suppose in retrospect I hoped to glean some reaction from the creature, however small, and it made me wonder as to the instinctive need in us humans to communicate with our fellow men. You see, the more accustomed I grew to the creature’s appearance, the more readily I accepted it, until it seemed almost human."

"Decades of coal dust nestle in lungs which rattle like a percolator as he breathes."

About the author...

Catherine McCarthy is a spinner of dark tales, often set in her native Wales, U.K.
She has published two novels and two collections of short stories and her new novella, Immortelle, will be published by Off Limits Press in July 2021.
Her stories have appeared in anthologies such as Graveyard Smash, The One That Got Away, and Diabolica Britannica, and her flash fiction has been published by Crystal Lake Publishing and Flame Tree Press.
In 2020, she won the Aberystwyth University Imagining Utopias prize for creative writing.
Catherine lives in an old farmhouse with her illustrator husband and its ghosts, and when she is not writing may be found hiking the rugged coast-path or photographing ancient churchyards for story inspiration.