Fiction that Incorporates Local Legends: An Annotated Reading List
Last week, we published the final installment of “Crybaby Bridge.” The story interacts with local legends, and Rebecca Turkewitz annotated a reading list of fiction that borrows from real folklore.
“Crybaby Bridge” first appeared in my debut story collection, Here in the Night. As one might guess from reading it, I’m fascinated by local lore. Many of the stories in Here in the Night have characters who tell each other ghost stories, stay up too late researching urban legends, and discuss the ways a town’s haunting might reveal their community’s shared fears. The majority of the legends in the book are invented, but several, such as the one in “Crybaby Bridge,” borrow from real folklore.
My interest in the power of ghost stories is also reflected in my reading taste. Here are some of my favorite short stories that that incorporate real or invented folklore.
Isabel Yap’s brilliant “Have You Heard the One About Anamaria Marquez,” recounts the many dark tales students tell about a girl who died at their school. In one version, her spirit is trapped forever in a painting. In another, students can hear the dead girl crying for help from the roots of a tree. In another, she emerges from the toilet in the third floor bathroom. The writing is sharp and propulsive, and the iterations of the ghost story are woven into the narrative beautifully. The story appears in Yap’s collection Never Have I Ever, and you can read it online in Nightmare Magazine.
Laird Barron’s haunting and gorgeous “The Redfield Girls” follows a close-knit group of middle school teachers who take a trip to Lake Crescent in rural Washington state. The teachers recount the sinister history of the preternaturally deep lake, and the tension builds as the story creeps towards its tragic conclusion. The story first appeared in the fabulous anthology Haunted Legends, edited by Ellen Datlow and Nick Mamatas, and was later included in Barron’s collection, The Beautiful Thing That Awaits Us All.
In Kelly Link’s “The Specialist’s Hat,” identical twin girls move into the former home of the mysterious poet Charles Cheatham Rash. Their mother is dead, and their father is completely preoccupied by the book he is writing about Rash. Rash’s estate is purportedly haunted, and an excerpt from an oral history of the property suggests that Rash’s life was as bizarre as his sudden disappearance. This inventive haunted house tale appears in Link’s aptly named collection, Stranger Things Happen. You can also read it on Link’s site.
Mia Alvar’s story collection In the Country isn’t horror, but it includes one of my favorite contemporary ghost stories. In “Legends of the White Lady,” an American model living in Manila, encounters a “weird and hazy ghost story, which [keeps] on changing shape.” You can read an excerpt from the story at Lit Hub.
Never Whistle at Night: A Indigenous Dark Fiction Anthology, edited by Shane Hawk and Theodore C. Van Alst Jr., is full of so many wonderful stories, it’s hard to highlight only one. But Mathilda Zeller’s unsettling “Kushtuka,” which incorporates folklore about the titular shape-shifting creatures, is a standout. The horror in the story comes not only from the supernatural forces at play, but also from the tense interpersonal dynamics between characters.
One of my favorite books as a child was Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark, so when I first encountered Carmen Maria Machado’s “The Husband Stitch,” I was absolutely delighted. It includes so many of the well-loved urban legends of my youth: the escaped maniac with a hook for a hand, the girl with the green ribbon that secures her head to her neck, and the toe hiding in the produce aisle at the grocery store. Despite the inclusion of these classic tales, its bold narrative choices make it feel completely original. You can find it online in Granta, or in Machado’s collection Her Body and Other Stories.
Rebecca Turkewitz is a writer and high school teacher living in Portland, Maine. She is the author of the story collection Here in the Night (Black Lawrence Press, July 2023). Her fiction and humor writing have appeared in The Normal School, Electric Literature, SmokeLong Quarterly, The New Yorker’s Daily Shouts, and elsewhere. She holds an MFA in fiction from The Ohio State University.
Follow her on Instagram, Twitter, and check out more of her work here.