Soul Taker: Book Four in the Mortlake Series, by David Longhorn. ScareStreet, 2021

Cambridge professor and paranormal investigation Marcus Mortlake can’t get a break. It’s his 50^th birthday and he has a new girlfriend, but his best friend is recently dead, and now an enemy from his childhood has come back to haunt him. Something is taking children in the village he grew up in, and it’s the same creature that tried to take him when he was young. This means going back to his old hometown, something he doesn’t relish. His relationship with his father is not good; his father seems to hold him responsible for the long ago death of his mother. On top of all this, the entity may be connected to Crowe, Mortlake’s nemesis.

It was interesting (and sad) to read about Mortlake’s childhood and how he first encountered the paranormal, and I liked the use of a mythological being. His friends all showed up to help, with a rather unique way of dealing with the entity. The Halloween atmosphere of course added to the eerieness. The strands of story that follow from book to book are getting more complicated with each volume, as Crowe tries to gain power in the Game, where he is stuck. I can’t wait to see where this is all going! Five stars.

 

The Old Magic of Christmas: Yuletide Traditions for the Darkest Days of the Year, by Linda Raedisch. Llweellyn Publications, 2020 (12^th printing)

I picked up this book, thinking it would be about Christmas ghost stories, and, hopefully, tell some of those stories. It does talk about the British practice of telling ghost stories at Christmas, but it’s really a collection of folk tales and practices, mainly from the more notherly areas of Europe. Elves, of course- although not quite the ones we think of today in respect to Christmas, Christmas beasties like horses and cats, goblins, tontum, witches, Santa Lucia, Yule logs, first-footing, plants and how they became standard Christmas décor, and, my favorite part and something I’d never heard of, vampires and werewolves associated with the dark days! There are even some related crafts and recipes included.

The author tries to stick absolutely everything she learned about Christmas/Yule/Solstice traditions into the book; because of this, the entries are very short and nothing is gone into in real depth. I found that very disappointing. There is, however, a good bibliography in the back so that the reader can go on to learn more about the subjects that take their interest. The book is a bit uneven; there were a couple of sections that I skimmed over after a while, but mostly it’s a fast, if somewhat disjointed, read. Four stars.