London's oldest inhabitants have never left. Spindledrift Goodfellow keeps his Bloomsbury bookshop. Jenny Greenteeth tends the Regent's Canal. Queen Mab curates her Soho theatre of forgetting. Ned Ludd watches from Tower Hill. The Fae present apparent bargains - sealed in blood, paid in souls, bound with bitter memories.
The London Fae is a novel in stories - a mythopoetic portrait of a city haunted by forces that are ancient, exacting, and without mercy. The Fae of these pages are beautiful and terrible in equal measure - not the whimsy of Victorian flower books, nor the adolescent fantasy of modern pulp. These Fae are closer to the ideas of Jeremy Harte, Patrick Harpur, John Keel and Jacques Vallée. Impossible to predict. Difficult to please. Hard to trust. The emissaries of the Unseelie Court come when invited, though you may not know what it was you did to invite them. Are they bearers of gifts, or messengers of deception? You decide. They don't care.
Structured in three parts across nearly four hundred pages, the collection moves from the intellectual satire of The Haunted Bookshop - in which a fading public intellectual attempts to mine the spirits of Bloomsbury for content and pays for it in the dark water of the Regent's Canal - through the gritty nautical horror of Thames Dark Halloween Ale, where an ancient pub on the Wapping waterfront runs on a bargain older than the brewery, to the surreal cold of The Frost Fair, where Queen Mab's pavilion glitters on a frozen Thames and the price of admission is not what it appears.
A Crow in the Chimney turns its attention to a tastefully restored Victorian house in Blackheath, where an affluent and performatively progressive couple discover that the ghost of a climbing boy who died in their flues in 1874 is entirely unimpressed by their charity work. The Silent Folk follows a lonely journalist drawn into Queen Mab's theatre of forgetting, recruited to destroy the objects of human memory - until he refuses, and discovers that his refusal is not the first, and will not be the last.
The collection closes with The London Stone, in which a qi gong practitioner encounters Ned - the god Nodens in a contemporary guise - at the ancient stone on Cannon Street, and understands at last what it might mean to heal a city that has forgotten its own meridians. And tucked at the end, the Addendum: The Bewcastle Fairies reaches back to 1653 and the Debatable Lands to find the origin of the bargains Spindledrift Goodfellow has been keeping ever since.
Running through every story is the same uncomfortable question: not whether the Fae are real, but whether any of us are honest enough to recognise what we have already agreed to. The reckonings in these pages are calibrated precisely to the particular way each person chose not to be straight with themselves. Drawn from genuine scholarship in British folklore, fairy belief, and the ultraterrestrial tradition, and rooted in the specific geography and history of London, The London Fae asks what it would mean to live in a city where we still owe the old ones their due.
Dark, funny, and written with deep affection for the city it haunts, this is folk horror for readers who want their folklore to bite.
Tony Walker is the author and narrator of the Classic Ghost Stories Podcast, one of the most successful independent ghost story channels in the world. He can be found at www.classicghost.com.
