Lee Foust’s Reviews > Randalls Round: Nine Nightmares by Eleanor Scott > Status Update

"The Old Lady" Another good first person narrator, adding some color. Still not a great ending--seems the weak spot of Scott's tales: the set-ups are engrossing and fun but sometimes the end is either predictable or a shade too fast, without the impact a good scary tale demands. On to the two addended tales presumed to be by the same author under a different pseudonym.

"Will Ye no Come Back Again?" Interestingly the only tale so far (only one left) to deal with the world of women at all--and seems perhaps a tad hostile, or maybe rightly critical. At any rate it worked well for the this tale--one of the better ones, mostly for this modern touch on an age-old haunting story.

"The Tree" An ok idea, a bit of a variation on Poe's "The Oval Portrait," with a dose of sympathetic magic, but the denouement was kind of clumsy.

"The Cure" a bit of a redux of the title story, but I think much better handled. For the first time in the collection we have a first person narrator and both this character and the fellow he's entrusted to "cure" are both convincing and, I thought, brought the thing home much better than in "Randall's Round." A great tale! Seems like they're getting better as the collection advances. Perfect tales for the solstice!

"The Room." Ah, this is my favorite so far. A nice Victorian-ish melding of Christian catabasis (a journey to hell to confront one's morality via God's judgement) and the "spending a night in a haunted house/room" trope. Philosophical yet quite simple. Still, a new take on the old tropes I much appreciated.

"Celui-la" Again: quality, serviceable prose, not quite the "lost classic" it's touted to be--but I'm enjoying the tales so far.

"The 12 Apostles" Nice one! A haunted house, a treasure hunt, a Renaissance alchemist, and lost of mysterious slime...very creepy. No Lovecraftian language but a practical straightforward approach.

"Randalls Round" pretty deliberate and straightforward--about what you'd expect now that film has made folk horror a genre. It's a shame one can't go back in time and experience the creation of a genre in chronological order. Still, effective.