THE ELFIN STONE AND OTHER STORIES

"For one icy second, or maybe two, the blood stopped flowing. My heart turned into a strawberry lolly. There was something eerily magical in the thick white air....Everything points to the Elfin stone. And everything comes from it, too."

The Elfin Stone and other stories is a collection of tales that range from the fantastic to the contemporary.

The title story narrates a woman’s journey back to Iceland and a brush with the ‘hidden folk’. Later, a father comes to terms with his innate competitiveness, a mother is afraid of swimming in the deep end, and there is a modern re-telling of Aesop’s Fable of The Town Mouse and the Country Mouse.

There are tales of loss and gain in ‘Anniversary’ and ‘Unicorns’. The reader is transported to the other end of the galaxy in ‘Star Bright’ and into the shadows of the forest in ‘The Day She Changed Forever’.

These are stories to be read at the hearthside or on the beach. Some are flashes of fiction: children longing for summer to last forever or missing their friends who have gone on holiday. Elsewhere the mood is humorous: a father competes in a talent show at a holiday camp and a woman tricks her husband into thinking she is taking cookery lessons.

There are hints of nostalgia: children playing with their cyber-pets, a woman reflecting on spending time with her grandmother, and a couple deciding if buying up an old family store is really right for them.

Magic realism appears in a story about magpies set in the Seventies. A new way of looking at weddings and an adult fairy tale add to the snapshots of humans doing what they do best, even if it doesn’t always seem so at the time. After all, there is no point in being human if you can’t bask in the sheer joy of simple hope.

All fiction is a form of fantasy. Low fantasy is found in the everyday: people snatching time from their busy working lives to find moments of joy. Mid fantasy is where people’s dreams rely on a little bit of magic to make them come true. High fantasy transports the reader to a whole new world. What links all of these stories is what it means to be human.