Let a Sleeping Witch Lie: Welsh Gothic Stories by Elizabeth Walter

 

Around the World in 80,000 Pages - Book 20

Let a Sleeping Witch Lie: Welsh Gothic Stories by Elizabeth Walter 

You can read about my Around the World in 80,000 Pages challenge here.

Miles travelled: 1,087 
Pages read: 7,694

When I Googled where the stories in this collection were set, it gave me one as being in Abergavenny. I'm not entirely sure this is accurate, but it's close enough.

Although the book is subtitled "Welsh Gothic Stories," the settings are actually dotted around the Welsh Marches, on both sides of the Welsh/English border. This is the same region we started the whole the journey, though now we are looking into England from the outside. The Welsh Marches are a region that has been seen as a boundary for thousands of years. The name Wales itself comes from the Old English Wēalas, meaning strangers. What would later become Hereforshire, Shropshire, and Cheshire were a buffer between the 'civilised' English and the 'other' Welsh. As I touched on in Shadows Over Baker Street, this sense of the area persisted as a liminal space: through the Victorian era and into our own times. Though Wales is now very much a part of the UK, there is still a general perception that what we know of as England peters out in this region, and the pastoral, consonant-heavy, Celtic lurks in the shadows.

Elizabeth Walter was born in London, but of Welsh stock, and grew up in Herefordshire, spending much of her downtime in Wales. She is primarily known as an editor, working for Collins' Crime Club for over 30 years. She penned a few novels and short story collections of her own, but found her inclinations and talents lay not in crime writing, but in eerie gothic horror. Let a Sleeping Witch Lie collects nine of her short stories, all set on the Welsh border.

There is a heavy influence of folklore throughout, but none of the stories really fall into the folk horror gamut (the closest would be Hushabye, Baby). Instead, the legends form the framework of what happens, but the communities are as much victims of the supernatural as the protagonists. 

Walter has a tendency to focus large parts of the stories on the non-supernatural (which I suppose would simply be the natural), but this adds greatly to the atmosphere. Her novels were criticised for their mundanity. But in her short stories (or these ones at least), she captures the thin, grey atmosphere of the region (especially during the 60s and 70s, when there were many isolated farmsteads that still lived almost pre-industrial lives), and her realistic style makes the unexplainable even more unsettling.

In places, the writing reminded me of John Grisham, though whether this is primarily down to the era and prevalent styles of the time, I am not experienced enough to say. Both writers capture a time that has since passed, but still feels real and grounded, and then set this against fantastic elements.

Under my unnecessarily complicated scoring system, 10 points are awarded for the physical book. Let a Sleeping Witch Lie earned an extra point for paper quality, but lost half a point as there are a couple of instances where mistakes that were obviously imported when the original stories were scanned into text recognition software ("not" being rendered as "riot", etc) have not been picked up during editing, though these are nowhere near as numerous as can be found in modern print-on-demand versions of old classics that proliferate on Amazon.

Let a Sleeping Witch Lie: Welsh Gothic Stories scored 110/140, earning it ★★★★☆.

The flag of the moment is the Cross of Saint David. Black and gold have long been associated with Saint David (who I can only assume was a Wolves fan), but the cross itself has only been used since the beginning of the 20th century, and was largely unknown until the 1990s.

Our suggested listening is Karl Jenkins' Cantata Memoria - Lament for the Valley, which was actually written in memory of the Aberfan disaster, but has an appropriately dark atmosphere.