The echoes between stories give the collection a wonderfully satisfying cohesion, so that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. I found the framing of this collection to be very enjoyable (retelling traditional folktales) and I liked that "traditional" did not entail "white, male, and hetero.

The Dampness is Spreading' by Emma Glass, based on 'The Fairy Midwife', was harrowing in its portrayal of motherhood and despair. Also enjoyed that they original tales can be read in the back of the volume for context and comparison. As with all story collections there were hits and misses, but I enjoyed the majority of them and I liked that the original tales were included at the end of the book. For the most part, the stories lack rigour and originality and will soon slip away to wherever the things we forget go. The eeriness of the story really draws you in, but I think the shortness means it falls flat as there's not much time to really carve out a solid, captivating ending.The main reason is that - this re-telling isn't a re-telling at all, it is a word-to-word story copied from the original tale, even the title is the same.

Obviously the gorgeously trippy cover pulled me right in, but underneath these authors have shown that the essence of folktales never really leaves us. The book has a very informative foreword, which is almost a story in itself, and explains how the book came to be and some info on what the retellings are based on. Although these terms are notoriously hard to define and classification is difficult, I would struggle to describe this as a “folk horror” collection. Hag features the re-tellings of dark folktales written by talented women from Daisy Johnson to Eimear McBride. Snaith really brought this piece of history to life by bringing in Indian storylines and focusing on female (bodily) autonomy.

That said, the old tales do reach deeper into the darker and creepier shadows that inhabit our landscapes and all the authors of these stories have managed to convey that feeling of dread that you can sometimes get with the old stories both. Each story is given either a feminist or a modern-world slant, or both, using the original stories as inspiration, rather than simply reproducing or ‘twisting’ them. It has both given me a much longer TBR pile, and also made me want to complete a 'Hag tour' so I can explore the areas it describes.