Echoes and Shadows Jon Manchip White
 
Digital Download

228 p.

a collection of twelve tales of the supernatural by Welsh writer, Jon Manchip White. These well-crafted, learned, entertaining, sometimes acerbic and often melancholy stories explore, through a varied range of narrative voices and vivid characters, the age-old Welsh obsessions with death and the distant past. Shifting seamlessly through time and space, the tales unravel in settings as diverse as prehistoric Wales and present-day Mexico. In 'Birdie', incomers to a small Welsh town discover the dangers of meddling in the affairs of inconvenient neighbours, and there are echoes of Manchip White's fellow-Welsh word-magician Arthur Machen in 'Angharad', in which a crippled young girl finds solace of a kind in an ancient Welsh grove. In 'Moel Hebog', a passionate Iron Age love-affair is immortalised in the form of a savage, ghostly hawk. A young man's seemingly harmless hobby becomes a nightmarish compulsion in 'Shadowplay', whilst in 'Ora Pro Nobis' an expatriate academic learns the value of uncomplicated religious faith from his Hispanic cleaning-woman. This new collection of stories more than lives up to Jon Manchip White's acknowledged ability to 'flit away from one's expectations and demonstrate the lasting power of fantasy, myth and fable to elude the ever-nearing grasp of reason.' - Chicago Tribune Contains: 'Knaves', 'Moel Hebog', 'Ora Pro Nobis', 'The Flask', 'Crystal', Corpse Candles', 'Shadowplay', 'A Box of Bones', 'The Jacket', 'Angharad', 'Smoke', 'Birdie', 'Epilogue'.