Lake Song: A Novel in Stories

by Lesley Pratt Bannatyne

Selected by Deesha Philyaw as winner of the AWP Grace Paley Prize in Short Fiction The linked stories of Lake Song, set in the fictional town of Kinder Falls in New York’s Finger Lakes region, span decades to plumb the complexities, violence, and compassion of small-town life as the twentieth century hurtles forward. Against a backdrop of historical events—bootlegging, Klan attacks, gold smuggling, the Albany Ketchup Murders, the 1965 Northeast blackout—a generations-long mystery unwinds. In 1906 Mavis Staunch drowns in Okisee Lake days after she refuses to sell her land to a trio of brothers. The same night, one of the brothers, Angus Epps, doesn’t come home. Few suspect the two events are connected, and no one imagines the role that a ten-year-old boy, a canoe, and a pack of coyotes play in the tragedies. Spiritualists, grifters, sugar makers, arsonists, seekers, and saleswomen wind through each other’s lives and across decades to add layers of resonance to each captivating story. The mercurial lake that unites the people of Kinder Falls sustains as much as it haunts, both witness and diary.

242 pages, Paperback

Published September 1, 2025

About the author

Lesley Bannatyne is an American author who writes extensively on Halloween, especially its history, literature, and contemporary celebration. She also writes short stories, many of which are included in her debut collection _Unaccustomed to Grace_, out from Kallisto Gaia Press in March, 2022. iN 2024, her Lake Song. A Novel in Stories won the Grace Paley Prize and is published by Mad Creek Books in September 2025.

Bannatyne has shared her knowledge on television specials for the History Channel ("The Haunted History of Halloween," "The Real Story of Halloween"), with Time Magazine, Slate, National Geographic, and contributed the Halloween article to World Book Encyclopedia. Her Halloween books range from a children's book, Witches Night Before Halloween, to Halloween Nation, which examines the holiday through the eyes of its celebrants. The book was nominated for a 2011 Bram Stoker Award. Her other titles are A Halloween How-To. Costumes, Parties, Destinations, Decorations (2001); A Halloween Reader. Poems, Stories, and Plays from Halloweens Past (2004), and Halloween. An American Holiday, An American History, which celebrated 30 years in print in 2020.

Her fiction and essays have been published in the Boston Globe, Smithsonian, Christian Science Monitor, and Zone 3, Pangyrus, Shooter, Craft, Ocotillo Review, Fish, and Bosque Literary Magazines. She won the 2018 Bosque fiction prize and received the 2019 Tucson Festival of Books Literary Award for fiction, the 2020 Ghoststory.com fiction prize, and the 2024 Grace Paley Prize for short fiction. As a freelance journalist, she covered stories ranging from druids in Massachusetts to relief workers in Bolivia.

Lesley lives and works in Somerville, Massachusetts.

Reviews

[Sandra Parker · Rating 5 out of 5]

A fascinating journey through recent history with the fictional residents of a not so fictional lake community that is close to my heart. The characters are sparingly drawn, but the reader gets a pretty clear understanding of their lives and roles in the small community. The character list is long and intertwined through the generations. The author develops the themes of how each generation influences the future through vignettes of everyday life of the lake’s down to earth residents. They experience love, loss, loneliness, love of place, issues of identity, end of life issues-all the concerns of people everywhere.

[Kris · Rating 5 out of 5]

Lake Song is beautifully written, with well drawn out characters, though only getting slices of their lives. The story lines are engaging, the writing lyrical, poetic in places. I could not put it down. This is the second book of fiction that Bannatyne has written; the signs of maturity are amazing and very exciting. I look forward to more from her.

[Susan Fernald · Rating 5 out of 5]

I loved the interwoven stories and characters that built on, or related to, the previous story. The varied characters were true to life and all had their internal as well as external battles that they faced with varying degrees of success. Bannatyne’s descriptions of person and place provide the reader with a vivid portrait.

[Judy Erwin · Rating 4 out of 5]

Living in the Finger Lakes I could really relate to the stories and the places that she wrote about. It was very enjoyable for me to read, and I loved how the different stories were all connected to each other. The characters were very unique and had a lot of depth to them.

[Justin · Rating 3 out of 5]

This one was really close, and I expect it will have its admirers. The book's a novel told through short stories, and the approach connects with some work I really like, including books by Erdrich, Mason, Strout, and more.

Some of this is truly excellent, like "Coaxing Sugar from the Trees" and "Fourth of July," and all of it is solid or better. There's some sort of disconnect in the overall approach, though. Without an anchor (to steal my wife's term), the novel gets a little too loose. As a short story collection, though, too many of them draw their weight from relying on other stories (though none of it quite connects like a novel). Bannatyne doesn't exactly write a novel about the town of Kinder Falls, but few of the individual characters have quite enough heft on their own to carry it as a work. There's considerable world-building here, and it all ties together (especially through the odd finale), but it doesn't quite work for me as a novel or a short story collection.

That review might be harsher than I mean it, because Bannatyne writes well and I like her attempt, so maybe I'll be the outlier among reviewers.

[Eileen Joyce-Donovan · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book, subtitled a Novel in Stories, is a series of short or flash fiction centered around characters who live in the Lake Okisee area. I would have preferred it if the author took some more time to actually write a complete novel rather than a collection of stories. I'm not sure how you can call this a novel when it is only a short story anthology.

I also found the writing style disconcerting. the author does not use quotation marks and so there is not distinction between narration and dialogue. I often found myself going back to reread something when I suddenly realized a character was speaking, that the statements were not narration. This pulled me out of the story and broke the continuity often needed to understand the acion.

[Marianne Adams · Rating 5 out of 5]

Lake Song is a portrait of a place and the people who live there told in interconnected stories. It has a sometimes poignant sometimes gritty view of humanity and the forces that drive us to act the way we do. It uses the fascinating history of the finger lakes region as a social and environmental backdrop to the generational stories in the novel.

[Nora Mann · Rating 5 out of 5]

Drew me in and didn’t let go. These are stories thru the years of a small town and its people, their lives and connections across time. The geology, geography, the anthropology, with a bit of magic make the Finger Lakes and the history come alive

[Alexandra Grabbe · Rating 4 out of 5]

Stories linked in a very interesting way over a period of around 80 years, so the book ends up feeling like a novel. The author's grandparents lived in the finger lakes region of New York, so she knows it well. Absolutely beautiful cover. Do check it out.