Long Lankin by Lindsey Barraclough
458 pages
Published 2011
Read from February 19 to February 22
Rating: ★★★½ out of 5
How would one make a YA novel out of the ballad of "Long Lankin"? The Steeleye Span rendition is one of my favorite British folk-rock tunes, so the moment I saw this book in the library's YA room, I knew I had to check it out -- but I was skeptical, even more so when I saw the book was set in 1958. How could that combination possibly work? The answer is, surprisingly well. Rather than contenting herself with a straightforward retelling of the ballad, Barraclough builds a Gothic ghost story of a marsh town, the children of which were Lankin's prey across four centuries, and of a pair of young East End sisters forced to return to the rotting pile of their ancestral estate, to face an inevitable confrontation with the monster. As a Gothic ghost story, none of the plot beats here were unexpected, and to be quite honest, I was not a fan of how Lankin was turned into a generic demon-horror, always a thin line to tread between scary and merely silly -- his on-all-fours locomotion, in particular, brought to mind images of a scuttling mongoose or ferret. Barraclough's characters and dialogue, however, were lovingly rendered, and kept me invested despite the familiar beats of the story. The atmosphere and attention to setting had me hooked as well. (All that reading of Roger Deakin and Robert Macfarlane has long had me idealizing the British countryside from afar.)
Barraclough's surprising success in translating the "Long Lankin" ballad into an effective YA novel has me worried that all the good Steeleye Span ballads will be snapped up and novelized before I get my own writing-works operational again. Has anyone written up "Twa Corbies" yet?
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