![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
A fix-up novel concerting five families who made an ancient deal with a fallen angel. This is never a good idea. Their descendants are mediums, warlocks, and (due to a changeling in one of the families) fae.
Not the cool, electric guitar playing fae. Not Tolkien's elves either. These are the fae from old folklore, the spectacularly creepy kind, like the ones Katherine Briggs collected stories of, then had illustrated with paintings like this, the nuckelavee (a skinless centaur). Files' fae are terrifying, sometimes beautiful, very alien, and profoundly tragic; most of my favorite stories involved them.
The book also has excellent stories involving conflicted quarter-fae priests, warrior nuns, formerly-possessed girls, time-traveling witches, and more. One of the main characters is Carraclough Devize, a genderswapped Benjamin Fischer from The Legend of Hell House! She's great. But my very favorite character was Ygerna Sidderstane, a throwback nix who only wanted to live a normal life and not be a horrifying predator "dripping in the dark." Everything about her is inventive, terrifying, and haunting.
Read the book in order. While some of the stories were published on their own, not all were, and it works as a kind of mosaic novel.
I liked Experimental Film a lot, but I loved this. For one thing, it's much scarier. Particularly the first story.
Not the cool, electric guitar playing fae. Not Tolkien's elves either. These are the fae from old folklore, the spectacularly creepy kind, like the ones Katherine Briggs collected stories of, then had illustrated with paintings like this, the nuckelavee (a skinless centaur). Files' fae are terrifying, sometimes beautiful, very alien, and profoundly tragic; most of my favorite stories involved them.
The book also has excellent stories involving conflicted quarter-fae priests, warrior nuns, formerly-possessed girls, time-traveling witches, and more. One of the main characters is Carraclough Devize, a genderswapped Benjamin Fischer from The Legend of Hell House! She's great. But my very favorite character was Ygerna Sidderstane, a throwback nix who only wanted to live a normal life and not be a horrifying predator "dripping in the dark." Everything about her is inventive, terrifying, and haunting.
Read the book in order. While some of the stories were published on their own, not all were, and it works as a kind of mosaic novel.
I liked Experimental Film a lot, but I loved this. For one thing, it's much scarier. Particularly the first story.
