BY EMILY
YOU SHOULD REALLY GET YOUR HANDS ON THIS ANTHOLOGY, if only to read the title story, These Our Monsters by Edward Carey. This short story is so good I am considering sending a copy to my long-time-ago college English professor.
It is written in the first person plural “we” of a small-minded catholic village recounting its run-in with goblins. The village is real and so is the story: Woolpit, Suffolk, and the legend of the Green Children. All the stories in the anthology are british place-based folktale retellings. This one is written like an ethnography, in a poor man's regional English. The voice is the theme, and that, in my opinion, is what makes a good story.
These we have: Adam, Aymer, Oddo, Gilbert, Hemmet, Gerolt, Roger, Hugh, John, Ralf, Nicolas, Wilkin and Watty. These we don't: Bonnacon Basilik, Chimera, Siths, Fauns, Devils, Leucrota, Ghosts and witches folk. Or either fould things in the forest. Or neihter objects they don't obey. Screaming in the houses — that we do. But not little people that are no bigger than a conker. Trees that have voices, never. Hunchedbacked longears — that we do. Childers born with two heafs, a pig with six legs, that sort of thing — no, no we do not. •
Cover: Jean Fouquet. Hours of Étienne Chevalier (excerpt). c. 1452-1460. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.
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