Book review: Long Lankin by Lindsey Barraclough

Murder, witchcraft and revenge are abroad and no child is safe.

Lindsey Barraclough’s chilling and truly haunting debut novel takes a centuries-old folk song featuring the scary bogeyman Long Lankin and turns the bare bones of his story into one of this year’s best young adult novels.

What could be a straightforward horror story is transformed by Barraclough’s elegant writing, its setting in a sheltered 1950s rural community, the multi-perspective narrative voice and her ability to conjure up an almost tangible sense of menace.

In legend, Long Lankin is a scarecrow figure who dwells in the wilds of the countryside and preys on the children of local villagers.

‘Let the doors be all bolted and the windows all pinned,

And leave not a hole for a mouse to creep in.

The doors were all bolted and the windows all pinned,

Except one little window where Long Lankin crept in.’

Here, he hovers around the graveyard of a decaying church in the village of Bryers Guerdon where young cockney sisters Cora and Mimi Drumm have been exiled while their mother recovers from a mental breakdown.

It’s a long way from home for the two girls who have been dispatched to their great aunt Ida’s tumbledown mansion, Guerdon Hall, with no explanation of their mother’s sudden disappearance and no warning of what to expect.

Auntie Ida is less than welcoming and she has a long list of rules which includes keeping windows and doors shut at all times and never, ever visiting the old church near the marshes.