Blair's Reviews > Grackle

(3.5) I haven’t read anything from PS Publishing for a while, and when I went to browse their recent releases, this – a new novella from the author of The Ghost Sequences – caught my eye. Grackle follows master’s student Andi as she travels to the ‘famously haunted town’ of Drakesburg on a research trip. With her sister reluctant to join in, she ends up with fellow student Emanuelle in tow. And it’s Emanuelle who tells her the story of Grackle, a piece of folklore she’s never heard before... and a story that, thereafter, seems to haunt her all over Drakesburg.

Grackle is not as good as the strongest stories in Sequences; for my money, ‘The Nag Bride’ is a more successful treatment of some of the themes also found here (grief, family ties, folklore). I liked the investigation elements best, and would have preferred more clue-chasing, less abstract stuff. It has bags of atmosphere, though, and the kind of evocative description that makes it easy to imagine a film adaptation.