Last month’s Genre Book Club topic was juvenile fiction which prompted me to reread Scots author Mollie Hunter’s THE KELPIE’S PEARLS. The story has an old highlands woman, living quietly in her cottage in modern Scotland (for the time it came out, which is the early 1960s), help out a kelpie. The Kelpie gives her a strand of pearls for a reward (not that she asked for one) and the two of them find common ground in that they’re both old and can both remember the highlands before cars and buses were everywhere.
Unfortunately things go wrong. A local trapper sees the pearls and becomes obsessed with robbing the kelpie (stealing from the fae is, of course, a very bad idea even in kids’ stories), the old woman draws so much attention when she visits Loch Ness (the kelpie arranged for her to see the monster) that she’s swarmed by papparazzi and her life is suddenly turned upside down. Can the kelpie see a way out?
This is a sweet, very low-key story, but it’s gently charming. I intend to (re)read more Hunter eventually.
WITCHCRAFT: A History in Thirteen Trials by Marion Gibson didn’t work for me at all, despite my interest in the topic. Perhaps that’s because where most books portray the trials as driven by personal animosities at the local level, Gibson sees it more a top-down process backed by a consistent theology of demonology, and I’m not sure I buy her take (please note that she’s a historian and I’m a lay reader so my opinion should be taken with a grain of salt). Also her final chapter on witchcraft today and popular perceptions is kind of a mess, dealing with Stormy Daniels (apparently she’s wiccan) and the Felon of the United States whining about how every criticism is a witch-hunt — it really felt like a bad fit for the book.
FRANKENSTEIN SLEPT HERE by Tim Kelly is a Monster Mash stage show in which Baroness Frankenstein has turned her home into a Hotel Transylvania-style refuge for monsters including schizoid Jacqueline Hyde. Uh-oh, though — a wealthy American socialite just bought the castle and is about to evict them! Can the monsters convince her they’re really just the domestic staff? Silly fluff that knows it (“You’re sitting on the Invisible Man!”); I think this would have been fun on stage. “In this place they should mark the towels his, her and its!”
ELAK OF ATLANTIS collects Henry Kuttner’s four sword and sorcery stories of the Atlantean princeling turned sell-sword after slaying his cruel father in self-defense and leaving the kingdom to his brother. Now he and his sidekicks — drunken swordsman Lycon and the druid Dalan — battle various Lovecraftian horrors (I was amused that the Norse gods here are presented as such) and would be conquerors. This isn’t up to Kuttner’s wife CL Moore’s Jirel of Joiry fantasies but they’re certainly entertaining; surprisingly the fourth story brings the series to a reasonable close rather than leaving it open-ended.
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