Long Lankin

This summer I read the book Long Lankin by Lindsey Barraclough. This book is really frightening. It is about how Cora and her little sister Mimi are sent to live with their Auntie Ida after their mother runs away and their dad has too much on his hands. Auntie Ida lives in the village of Bryers Guerdon, in Guerdon Hall. Everything is going well, until Cora realizes that the villagers go silent every time Auntie Ida walks into a room. Then they whisper about how she ‘should not be allowed to have kids stay with her.’ Then Cora and her friends Roger and Pete discover mysterious words written inside an abandoned old church, a man in the church graveyard with a scarred face, and a strange awful creature crawling through the darkness towards their bedroom. This story, while it is still very scary, is based off the most realistic fears possible.

           

Long Lankin was originally a folk song about murder, witchcraft, and revenge. The author incorporates every aspect of the folk song into her novel, down to the baby being a boy and the witch being the boy’s wet nurse. Long Lankin, however, appears in the folksong to be a man wrought with revenge over a love stolen, and this is why he kills her. In the book, however, Long Lankin is a gruesome thing not even human that crawls through the grass, preying on innocent children who live at Guerdon Hall. The author clearly changed the person of Long Lankin to be more alarming, while, in my opinion, a man himself, without the gruesomeness of the skull and bony fingers, would have scared me more. It is more frightening to have the murderer look like someone we could all have seen walking on the street any day then a gruesome monster. That would’ve been scarier three years ago.

Another source of fear is generated from that monster-in-your-house type feeling. When we were younger, we used to think that monsters where in our house, and used to sprint, heart pounding, to the bathroom in the dead of night. This book uses a lot of moments of Cora laying in bed and hearing noises of scratching and little whispers in the dark. That has all happened to us. After a nightmare, the tiniest sounds are magnified to the point of thinking that the branch scraping against a window is a monster coming up the stairs. Even though it is scary, it’s scarier for younger children.

The book Long Lankin, while still being scary, is based off the most realistic fears that have been copied and copied in many, many novels. It is using basic fears and normal feelings that you get at night in the dark or when you’re scared.