You know these ballads. For two hundred years, they were sung as his story. You have never heard them like this.
In seven short story retellings of Scotland's oldest, darkest ballads, the women those songs reduced to warnings, witches, and casualties take up the telling themselves. Nannie reveals the dance was never the scandal-it was the only freedom she'd ever had, until a drunk man named her Cutty Sark, and she made him regret it. Janet grips the burning iron through Tam Lin's every shape, and tells her daughter why. The Queen of Elfland traces every river of blood back to its source, and finds a lie waiting there.
Confessions, curses, and reckonings, in voices that have waited a long time to be heard. Lyrical, unsettling, and steeped in folk horror, Their Own Dark is a debut collection in the tradition of Angela Carter and Kirsty Logan, for readers of Carmen Maria Machado.