Eerie East Anglia: Fearful Tales of Field and Fen

by Edward Parnell (Editor)

A seaside honeymoon holiday is plagued by the mystery of bells which never stop ringing – and that which answers the call. Druidic rites and modernity spells disaster at a Norfolk golf course. An ancient relic found on the Suffolk coast summons a nightmarish entity to its discoverer.

A land of mind-stretching expanses, wide, yawning skies and the disorientating landscapes of the tidal fens, East Anglia has inspired a wide range of writers in the field of weird and uncanny fiction.

This new collection includes a wealth of tales from the past 130 years set in Norfolk, Essex, Suffolk and Cambridge by a host of authors including ghost tale luminaries M. R. James, Robert Aickman, E. F. Benson and Marjorie Bowen, alongside bright lights of modern weird writing.

Insightful introduction and notes from Norfolk-based award-winning author Edward Parnell.

Genres: Horror, Short Stories, Fiction, British Literature, Anthologies, Folklore, Weird Fiction

288 pages, Paperback

First published August 22, 2024

About the author

Edward Parnell is the author of the narrative non-fiction 'Ghostland' (William Collins), shortlisted for the 2020 PEN Ackerley Prize for memoir. He lives near Norwich in the UK and has an MA in Creative Writing from the University of East Anglia. He has been the recipient of an Escalator Award from the National Centre for Writing and a Winston Churchill Travelling Fellowship. 'The Listeners' (2014) was his first novel, and was the winner of the Rethink New Novels Prize.

Reviews

[Paul · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.25 stars
Another British Library Tales of the Weird collection, this time focussing on a particular area. In this instance East Anglia covers Norfolk, Suffolk and Essex. Also included are parts of Cambridgeshire and South Lincolnshire (the Fennish part).
There are seventeen stories in total. Two are by M R James, including one of his more famous stories “Oh, Whistle, and I’ll come to you, my lad”. There are also stories by R H Benson, E F Benson (brothers), E G Swain, Gerald Bullett, Ingulphus, H R Wakefield, F M Major, Marjorie Bowen, Frederick Cowles, R H Malden, Robert Aickman, John Gordon, Penelope Fitzgerald, Matthew Holness and Daisy Johnson. Some of the stories are quite recent and the Daisy Johnson story is from her collection Fen.
The topography of the area feeds into the stories. The flat, wet landscape of the fens and the Norfolk Broads. Isolated sand dunes and a certain bleakness. There’s a lot of history as well and one story has links to druidic influences. M R James’s influence is strong and the understatedness of both his pieces stand out. Generally these are fairly rural tales and some good ones are included. Apart from James, the stories by Bowen, Swain, Wakefield and Fitzgerald are also good.

[K.J. Charles]

Much as ever with these BL collections of mostly out of print ghost stories, this one set in the Fens, which is a satisfyingly spooky landscape. MR James beats all the rest effortlessly, natch, but it's a pretty solid collection overall except for the awful 'Possum'.

[p. · Rating 3 out of 5]

To be honest, I am not sure location-based collections work too well for this series. I found some of the entries difficult to get through or focus on, though some were absolutely fantastic. I feel like the ones that did truly well managed to take advantage of embody the atmosphere of the region better than all others. Perhaps the criteria for selection should have focused on this particular rather than simple geographical setting alone.

Favourite entries: "Oh, Whistle, and I'll Come to You, My Lad" by M.R. James, "Father Maddox's Tale" by R.H. Benson, "The Dust-Cloud" by E.F. Benson, "The Man with the Roller" by E.G. Swain, "Dearth's Farm" by Gerald Bullett, "Miss de Mannering of Asham" by F.M. Mayor, "The House on the Marsh" by Frederick Cowles, "Ringing the Changes" by Robert Aickman, "If She Bends, She Break" by John Gordon, "Possum" by Matthew Holness (one of the few I felt strongly compelled to read a second time)

[Sarah Leanne Maurin · Rating 3 out of 5]

old timey people were afraid of the weirdest things

[Nailya · Rating 2 out of 5]

Eerie East Anglia is one of the latest issues of the British Library's Tales of the Weird collection. The volumes are organised around a theme (London, Trains, Woods, Seashores) and are comprised of mostly out of print (and copyright!) eerie tales. Edward Parnell, the author of the excellent Ghostland (see my review on my grid), edited this volume, dedicated to the eerie stories of East Anglia.

For those who are not familiar with East Anglia - our region has a very distinctive flat landscape defined by water. Seawater surrounds us almost on all sides, and the water of the Fens and the Broads creates an unsettling liminal landscape. The stories in this collection are inspired primarily by the landscape, not the local culture. Not many fiction authors were inspired by the rich folklore of the region, which is such a shame.

Ed Parnell did a fantastic job editing this collection, providing a fascinating selection of more popular and out of print stories with useful contextual commentary, taking Eerie East Anglia up to the present day (I imagine he'd have to fight the publisher to get copyrighted material here). Sadly, what I took out of this collection is that horror ages much quicker than literary fiction. None of the stories scared me, and only one - by Robert Aickman - really engaged me. It was interesting to read some of the stories from an academic perspective and try to analyse them, but they didn't really work for me as entertaining fiction. I'd still recommend this to people interested in East Anglia, as it is edited with such care, passion, and love, but I was bored rather than scared out of my mind almost the entire time.

[Richard · Rating 3 out of 5]

A very enjoyable collection of weird stories, with the usual mixture of forgettable and memorable tales, but only one that I actually disliked (Possum). Sadly, for someone who collects these British library stories, two of them were repeats from other editions, which is slightly annoying as I get the sense there was a wealth of stories to choose from and the collection would have been better served by not including ones selected elsewhere. Easy Anglia is now suitably impressed in my mind as a slight ethereal and lonely place, and the stories did a fantastic job of collectively giving the reader a picture of this rugged and seemingly endless land.

[Fionnuala · Rating 4 out of 5]

A fantastic collection, exactly the kind of thing you're hoping for when you think of a good, classic ghost story. I actually grew up for a while in Suffolk, so a lot of these places and landscapes were familiar to me; all of these stories do justice to the wonderful eeriness of the place, and are masterfully selected. When I saw this in the bookshop I knew it would be right up my street, but there was one test it had to pass first: if it didn't contain M. R. James' unmatched "'Oh, Whistle, and I'll Come To You, My Lad'", how much could I trust it? Well, it was the first story in the collection. Immediate purchase, and I did not regret it.

I enjoyed every story, and while I have my favourites there were none that let the collection down. Personal preference has me thinking that a couple of stories might have worked better if they had slowed down a little, and one of them in particular I think might have been better as a novella, as it seemed a little constrained by its short length (I am not surprised to find it has a longer, fuller movie adaption by the author himself). Even so, the stories as they were still had a great atmosphere and I enjoyed them; I might just be being greedy and wanting more, which at least is always the mark of compelling writing.

I enjoy writing ghost stories myself, and I have to admit that while I've had the honour of growing up and living in some very old and haunted places (Ireland and Scotland being great contenders) it's the lonely beaches and open fields and gnarled woods of East Anglia that constantly haunt the imagery of many of my stories. This collection is a brilliant showcase of just how good it can be, and why the landscape has captured the imagination of so many excellent writers with an eye for the uncanny. I don't suppose my own stories will ever hold a candle to theirs, but this book makes me want to try.

[Lizixer · Rating 4 out of 5]

I come from East Anglia and we know that we are an old place full of ghosts, horror and eeriness. These stories tap into the strange underbelly of those pretty chocolate box villages, mighty cathedrals rising out of the fens, weird isolated communities on the edge of the land. M R James knew, Daisy Johnson knows.

One of my favourite ghost stories that is macabre and unsettling The Crown Derby Plate by Marjorie Bowen is in here and, of course, Aickman is here but there were some revelations too, such as John Gordon’s sad little tale.

Don’t come to East Anglia for extravagant gory tales of horror. Instead expect the horror to creep into your soul, disturb your dreams, step out of the darkness and fill you with melancholy. M R James’ A Vignette pretty much sums it up: “I could never glean any kind of story bound up with the place. However, the strong probability that there had been one once I cannot deny.”

We are an old place where bad things happened that are long forgotten or never known but the land holds the memories all the same.

[Jay Rothermel · Rating 4 out of 5]

Eerie East Anglia: Fearful Tales of Field and Fen contains oft-anthologized classics and several discoveries. 

The jewel in the crown is "Miss de Mannering of Asham" by F. M. Mayor, a sublime novella of misfortune and its spectral residue. Heartbreaking and poignant. 

F. M. Mayor is worth seeking out.

[Josie · Rating 5 out of 5]

Absolutely love an anthology/collection of short stories. This is a great mixture of classic ghost stories and more psychological tales from that get in your head from different time periods and authors.

[David Paul Morgan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Another fantastic collection. East Anglia being the Cambridge home of MR James!
One story reminded of the work of Adam Nevill !

[Isabella Barbutti · Rating 5 out of 5]

As you all know, the British tales of the weird collection is one of my favourite things in the world, so I’ll probably give 5 stars to all of the books in it. But this one in particular was even better than the others I’ve read, and more scary too.

Here are the reviews for each of the stories in the book:

"Oh whistle, and I'll come to you, my lad" 5*

Father Maddox's tale 3*

The dust-cloud 4*
Not my favourite, as it involves ghost cars, but still good and with this interesting quote.
"[...] two or three of the party [...] had strolled out on to the terrace to look at the sea, over which the moon, large and low, was just rising and tracing a path of pale gold from horizon to shore, while others, less lunar of inclination, had gone in search of bridge or billiards."

The man with the roller 5*
I don't usually feel afraid when reading these stories, but this one gave me chills

The true history of Anthony Ffryar 4*
My high note mostly comes from the fact that the story is set in 1541 in one of the Colleges in Cambridge, and it never ceases to amaze me how old the University of Cambridge is. This particular College, for example, was founded in 1496.
The story itself is not amazing, but interesting, as it follows Anthony Ffryar, a student of alchemy, and his pursuit for a "master-cure for human all ailments" during the outbreak of a fatal epidemic. Of course things took a turn for the creepy, and at that point I didn't quite understand what happened or, rather, if what happened was really happening or if it was an hallucination from Anthony Ffryar.

Dearth's farm 5*
Part of why I like reading classic ghost stories is the language used in them. And the language used in this story is so amazing that I am currently taking notes to remember to read more of Gerald Bullett.
"In the train I amuse myself by summoning up some of those ghosts of the past, a past not distant but sufficiently remote in atmosphere from my present to be invested in with a certain sentimental glamour." (After reading that I think that's the only thing a person should be doing on a train ride).
Apart from that, the story is completely scary and absurd, to a point where I didn't know if I felt frightened, confused or bad about the whole situation. Highly recommend.

The seventeenth hole at Duncaster 4*
This story takes place at a golf club and has a lot of golfing terms that I am unfamiliar with, so I didn't think I would enjoy it. But as it progressed it moved away from the game and more into the misterious happenings at the woods close to the seventeenth hole, so I enjoyed it.

The crown derby plate 5*
The common theme of all of the stories in this book is that they happen in East Anglia, an area of the east of England that, as the introduction points out, is not precisely outlined nowadays. The area is mostly flat with marshland, with more saltmarshes and liminal spaces as you come closer to the coast. Whenever I think of that area I tend to think of the coastline, with flooded areas, the wind and the sea (as in The Essex Serpent), but this is not exactly the setting of the majority of the stories of this book so far. So I was extremely happy when I discovered that this particular story takes place in the Essex marshes. And it is as I expected: atmospheric and chilling, even though it revolves around the subject of a missing plate of a china set.

Miss de Mannering of Asham *4
"I remember when I looked up at the sky I observed that it had changed. As we were coming it had had the ordinary pale no-colour aspect, which it bears for quite half the days in the year. Some people grumble at it, but it is very English, and if you do not like it, relish it, you cannot really relish England."

Me and my sister have a long standing tradition of noting down how the English sky is depicted in our favourite songs (usually with words like gray, silver, pale), a distinctive difference from the Brazilian sky. So of course I had to share that quote with her. Can I say I relish it now that I am living in England? Probably yes, on most days.
But going back to the story. It was fine, but not my favourite in the collection. I did really enjoy the writing style though.

The house on the marsh 5*
That was creepy and scary and had crime involved!

Stivinghoe Bank 3*
Not very exciting. I kept expecting something to happen, and even though I could feel the tension building up, nothing major happened.

Ringing the changes 5*
I felt as if I was hearing the bells myself, and almost went mad. The reason for the bells being rung was even more disturbing than the incessant ringing, and by the end I was frightened.

If she bends, she breaks 3*
I understood what was happening straightaway, so I didn't have the chance of being surprised by the "revelation". And overall it was extremely sad instead of being scary, so it wasn't my favourite.

Dr. Matthews' Ghost Story 3*
That was weird and I am unsure I understood the story correctly.

Possum 0*
Ok, I decided I am giving this one zero stars. I wish I could unread that (I am glad my memory is not that good anyway, so I'll probably forget it soon). For starters, one of the reasons I like this collection is because it focuses on old stories. So I was surprised this was from 2008, but decided to give it a go anyway (and, as you'll see bellow, the next story is even more recent and I loved it).

But this one was creepy in a way I don't like at all. Possum is a disgusting creature and so absurd I wasn't sure I was imagining it correctly. Knowing there was a movie from 2018, I decided to google it and discovered that, sadly, I was right (I don't recommend googling it).
I honestly considered not even finishing this short story, but carried on anyway to see if I could make sense of what was happening. By the end I had not understood the story and was throughly disgusted.
I did research the meaning of the story and only then I understood the psychology behind it: a character struggling to express repressed childhood trauma, and finally the revelation of said trauma. Still I wish I hadn't read it (and surprised it turned into a movie).

Blood Rites 5*
As I said before, I wasn't sure I'd enjoy a more recent story, especially about three vampires, but I loved this one so much I have already put several of Daisy Johnson books in my TBR. I think it was a terrific addition to the collection, as it is not only set at the Fens, but the location and it's characteristics are embedded in the story in a fascinating way.

A Vignette 3*
This one, as the first in the collection, is written by M.R. James, the most important writer of ghost short stories in this region. I have noticed I didn't write a review for the first one, which I thought was great and had all I could hope for in ghost story.
This one wasn't so nice though, and I had a hard time focusing on the story.

[Sophy H · Rating 5 out of 5]

A fantastic set of creepy stories that feature the fens of East Anglia.

One or two of these I've read before (Oh Whistle for example I've read a number of times) however they are a pleasure to read again.

With the exception of Matthew Holness's Possum, all of the stories really conjure up a sense of atmosphere and place, with the ever shifting and ethereal fens as the backdrop to real tales of terror and foreboding.

This paragraph for example in The Crown Derby Plate by Marjorie Bowen is exquisite:-

"Under the wintry sky, which looked as grey and hard as metal, the marshes stretched bleakly to the horizon, the olive-brown broken reeds were harsh as scars on the saffron-tinted bogs, where the sluggish waters that rose so high in winter were filmed over with the first stillness of a frost; the air was cold but not keen, everything was damp; faintest of mists blurred the black outlines of trees that rose stark from the ridges above the stagnant dykes; the flooded fields were haunted by black birds and white birds, gulls and crows, whining above the long ditch grass and wintry wastes"......

If you close your eyes, you can literally picture this scene in your head.

These stories are a means of transportation to another world, a world of the haunted, the surreal and the spectral.

A fabulous 5 stars.

[Mark · Rating 3 out of 5]

2.5. Mixed bag as these things often are, with quite a few duds. The most successful stories are the ones where the characters have a bit more focus, and not just the eerie goings on. The stories by the following were all haunted gems - Robert Aickman, MR James, John Gordon, Marjorie Bowen, Matthew Holness and Daisy Johnson.

[Madeline Tyler · Rating 2 out of 5]

East Anglia is such a great setting for horror and ghost stories - I wish this collection had featured more that were set there! Some great ones (particularly liked the ones by E. G. Swain, Gerald Bullett, Marjorie Bowen, F. M. Mayor, Robert Aickman, John Gordon and Daisy Johnson), but a lot that didn't grab me or spook me. And way too many stories by rich, white, Cambridge men (you can't just include a load of stories by men who went to the University of Cambridge and call it an East Anglian anthology).

[Ian McDowell · Rating 4 out of 5]

A bit of a mixed bag, but mostly pretty great stories.

[Katherine Brightwell · Rating 5 out of 5]

It’s spooky season folks 👻

[A_Place_In The_Orchard · Rating 5 out of 5]

We live in glorious times if you love old ghost (and related) stories. Between this series, the Wimbourne collection of Victorian tales, and the Handheld Weird titles, we could be back in the 1970s when the Pan Horror and Fontana Ghost collections were many (UK) teenagers first introduction to the genre.

Great curation and a mix of well known and long forgotten authors keep every book in the series (at least that I've read) moving along, and if occasionally you come across one that you might skip, whether because you've read it before, or you're just not interested in it), the next one is guaranteed to suck you back in.

This one I chose to write about because I love the area, know the legends and have even met people who've experienced them. But none of those factors are at all necessary. I'm reading the Cornwall volume right now and I've never been there in my life. Still thoroughly enjoying it, though.

[Alex Sarll]

The title feels a little more like something you'd expect a local history society to put out than a proper Tales of the Weird, but I was sufficiently impressed by Parnell's Ghostland that I was always going to be interested in a British Library collection edited by him. That said, I wouldn't have bought this one; it does have the brilliant idea of a 'further reading' section to point readers at East Anglian stories featured in other volumes of the series, rather than duplicate them...but then fails to fully commit, reprinting Marjorie Bowen's The Crown Derby Plate from one of the Christmas installments. Given the theme, you can't really not have MR James, or Aickman, but they are very familiar terrain; RH Malden, Matthew Holness, and a tale told within Penelope Fitzgerald's novel about a not-quite-James aren't as inevitable, but I have read them too. Set against which, they are all good stuff. As is most of this, to be fair: RH Benson will never be up there with his siblings, but at least Father Maddox's Tale is only a bit flat and pious, rather than actively objectionable, as he often was. And John Gordon, as in his novels, may be oddly uncertain about the pacing and overall effect, but is eminently capable of scattering haunting images and chilling moments. The only one really letting the side down is Frederick Cowles; Parnell assures us that The House On The Marsh is one of his less derivative efforts, but if so, I dread to see the others.

Still, that leaves plenty of top notch material. The best of the Benson brood, EF, is represented too; I'd not encountered The Dust Cloud before, but it gets a lot done within fewer than 20 pages, from a consideration of whether a car might have a ghost to a general mechanics of haunting and an early investigation of the way some people change for the worse once they get behind the wheel. The Seventeenth Hole At Duncaster was not a promising prospect; when even PG Wodehouse tends to lose me with golfing material, what hope for HR Wakefield? But it turns out he has a wonderfully dry way with character, and my opinions on the game means I'm very much in the market for a tale of a good walk spoiled BY UNCANNY DEATH. Still, I'm tempted to award the laurels to FM Mayor, not a name I knew, for Miss De Mannering Of Asham, which I initially feared might lean a little sentimental and pious, and certainly isn't altogether free of that, but counterpoints it with some surprisingly horrific material. More than that, though, this is a collection where even the duds draw power from the uncanny landscape in which they're set, and nobody here catches that excessive, unnatural flatness, the waiting water and the yawning sky, quite so well as Mayor. Here's her narrator on the sky:
"As we were coming it had the ordinary pale no-colour aspect, which it bears for quite half the days in the year. Some people grumble at it, but it is very English, and if you do not like it, or more than like it, you cannot really relish England. The sky had now that strange appearance to which days in the north are liable; I do not think they know anything about it in Italy or the south of France. It is a fancy of mine that the sudden strangeness and wildness one finds in our literature is due to these days; it is something to compensate us for them."
This was one of a few times the contributors caught our climate and its odd effects well enough to make me search again and see if David Wrench's gale-force anthem Superhorny had been restored to the internet yet, but alas, no. See also the closing story (bar a brief autobiographical reprise for James), Daisy Johnson's Blood Rites, in which three vampiric women move from Paris to the Fens, only to find the meals sit heavier in their new home. Which sounds comical, and to an extent it is, but it's terribly sad with it, not to mention creepy, even if I was possibly more alarmed at one of these books having a story by someone born in 1990.

[Delphine · Rating 5 out of 5]

Under the wintry sky, which looked as grey and hard as metal, the marshes stretched bleakly to the horizon, the olive-brown broken reeds were harsh as scars on the saffron-tinted bogs, where the sluggish waters that rose so high in winter were filmed over with the first stillness of a frost; the air was cold but not keen, everything was damp; faintest of mists blurred the black outlines of trees that rose stark from the ridges above the stagnant dykes; the flooded fields were haunted by black birds and white birds; gulls and crows, whining above the long ditch grass and wintry wastes. from The Crown Derby Plate (Marjorie Bowen)

Ah, East Anglia, with its flat expanses, wide skies, salt marshes, disorientating tidal fens and the sea as liminal element: a breeding ground par excellence for the genre of the weird and uncanny short story. In this volume, Edward Parnell has selected 17 tales set in Norfolk, Suffolk, Essex and Cambridgeshire. They span several decades, from the 1900s to the 2010s.

Parnell, at home in the landscape of his boyhood, has drawn on the incredible wealth of folklore and superstition in the region. His selection is exquisite in its variety, starting off with the resident author M.R. James and his Cambridge croonies, and moving on to horror writer Robert Aickman and more contemporary writers such as Matthew Holnes and Daisy Johnson.

A selection of highlights:

'The man with the roller' by E.G. Swain, in which an evil-faced man is moving around a photograph with a roller, trying to conceal a murder;

'Dearth's farm' by G.W. Bullet, in which a man slowly and then suddenly transforms into a malignent white horse;

'The Crown Derby Plate' by Marjorie Bowen, delightful in its light tone, in which a woman tries to retrieve a china plate from a lonely house that used to belong to an antiquary. A man with an earth-stained robe, who lives in the garden, opens the door;

'The house on the marsh' by Frederick Cowles, a Dorian Gray-like fable, with a satanic ritual at its heart;

'Stivinghoe Bank' by R.H. Malden, in which a visit to a ruined chapel with a former evil incumbent has disruptive consequences;

'Ringing the changes' by Robert Aickman, in which booming bells near a hotel are ringing to wake the dead;

'If she bends, she breaks' by John Gordon, in which the ghost of a boy forgot he drowned;

'A vignette' by M.R. James , with its excellent final paragraph on what constitutes the uncanny:

Are there here and there sequestered places which some curious creatures still frequent, whom once on a time anybody could see and speak to as they went about on their daily occasions, whereas now only at rare intervals in a series of years does one cross their paths and become aware of them; and perhaps that is just as well for the peace of mind of simple people.

[Leila Anani · Rating 4 out of 5]

While there weren’t nearly enough stories set in Suffolk as I’d hoped, – there’s far more Norfolk and Cambridgeshire, there are still some excellent tales in this.

Mr. R James’ masterpiece Whistle and I’ll come to you my lad opens, but since that goes without saying it is on some of the less familiar tales that I wish to focus.

The highlight for me was Mattew Holness (Garth Marenghi)’s Possum – I was a fan of the film when it came out, but the story takes the creepiness to a new level.

Other stories of particular note – Gerald Bullett’s Dearth’s Farm – which has the frontispiece illustration of a man turning into a horse is wonderful. Robert Aickman’s Dunwich-esque zombie tale Ringing the Changes is very atmospheric. I wish the 60’s TV adaptation had survived, if it was anything like the BBC’s Whistle and I’ll come to you, adaptation I think it could have been very creepy indeed. I also liked E.G. Swain’s The Man with the Roller and Daisy Johnson’s vampire tale Blood Rites – where female vampires find East Anglian men disagree with them.

Over all a pretty good anthology evoking the flat bleak East Anglian landscape which is ripe for a good ghost story….

[Richard Howard · Rating 3 out of 5]

Most of these 'British Library Tales of the Weird' anthologies are very patchy with many tales, especially the older, seeming rather quaint or even silly rather than eerie or unsettling. This collection has a higher ratio of truly weird stories. The gem is, of course, the much anthologised "Oh Whistle and I'll come to you..." by the incomparable M.R. James. But other tales by Robert Aickman and John Gordon are very effective and "Possum" by Matthew Holness is extremely disturbing, as is the film that was based on it. East Anglia is a strange part of England. It is, comparably, unpopulated and one can cycle all day without seeing anyone, encountering ancient churches and mounds with nary a soul around...

[Rhys Causon · Rating 3 out of 5]

Considering I know how creepy the Fens and East Anglia coastal areas can be on a dark autumnal day… these stories did not quite capture the same vibe. Maybe it’s because I decided to read it in Summer or maybe it’s because it started with the best story in the collection and everything failed to meet that level.

Because once again ‘Oh Whistle, And I’ll Come To You, My Lad’ by M. R. James made my spine creep and skin crawl despite how simple the scares are. After that the better stories would be The Man with the Roller and The House on the Marsh. But those stories together can’t help how many of these just felt boring to read.

[Oli · Rating 4 out of 5]

“Oh, Whistle, and I’ll Come to You, My Lad” 4*
Father Maddox’s Tale 3.5*
The Dust-Cloud 4*
The Man with the Roller 3.5*
The True History of Anthony Ffryar 5*
Dearth’s Farm 4.5*
The Seventeenth Hole at Duncaster 3*
The Crown Derby Plate 4*
Miss de Mannering of Asham 4*
The House on the Marsh 4*
Strivinghoe Bank 4.5*
Ringing the Changes 4*
If She Bends, She Breaks 3.5*
Dr. Matthew’s Ghost Story 3.5*
Possum 3.5*
Blood Rites 3.5*
A Vignette 4*

[Jen Tidman · Rating 4 out of 5]

As with any short story collection, a mixed bag, but very enjoyable for someone born and raised in East Anglia with a penchant for horror, especially folk horror. The standout stories were "Oh, Whistle, and I'll Come to You, My Lad" by M. R. James, The Man with the Roller by E. G. Swain, The Crown Derby Plate by Majorie Brown, The House on the Marsh by Frederick Cowles, and Ringing The Changes (which I'd read before) by Robert Aickman, but my absolute favourite was Blood Rites by Daisy Johnson.

[Nicola Everett · Rating 3 out of 5]

Some stories shone…but much of this was a little underwhelming which is a shame. I thought there would be more engagement with Norfolk folkloric culture rather than the stories being purely focused on landscape - no black shuck, no will o’ the wisp etc. Glad I read it, but not entirely what I’d hoped for going in.

[Julian Alexander · Rating 3 out of 5]

Mixed bag of stories here. Had to give this a read as I am from East Anglia, and it's always nice to represent the home turf. There were a handful of absolute gems in here, mixed in with a few duds that didn't really do it for me. I've not always been able to get on with Victorian writing, which is perhaps why more than a couple of these tales didn't resonate.

[PJ Ebbrell · Rating 3 out of 5]

More a 3.5 but highly enjoyed. Obliviously stories are good, miss or average, but overall a cut above the usual selection. The MR James ending story, A Vignette, is definitely a classic and has the landscape wonderfully down right and the hint of supernatural menace is spot on.

[Max Rudd · Rating 4 out of 5]

A well put together anthology of East Anglian chillers from Good Read author @EdwardParnell .
Check out my full review, including the results of a Q&A with the editor himself:

https://youtu.be/u4nWe7lGEIo

[Samuel (Still Reading Sam) M. · Rating 3 out of 5]

Again it's a mixed bag. Some really stand out and are well executed. Others felt fumbled or too short for my tastes