Introduction
Hollie s tarling
Once a year, the market town of Honiton in Devon performs the rites of a tradition thought to be more than 800 years old. Children gather in the town’s public square to compete for pennies cast out from the windows above. In times past, the nobility found it amusing to watch peasants scrabbling in the dirt for the coins. Back then, it is said, the pennies were first heated on the stove. Why? Because the spectacle was much more entertaining, the desperation much more evident, when to collect them the poor had to burn their fingers.
There is power in tradition. ‘The way things have always been done’ carries an authority that resists scrutiny. A selfstyled mouthpiece of a community’s ancestors can be particularly persuasive. Take Christopher Lee’s betweeded autocrat Lord Summerisle in the 1973 film The Wicker Man, speaking of his father and father’s father before him: ‘He brought me up the same way, to reverence the music and the drama and the rituals of the Old Gods. To love nature and to fear it. And to rely on it and to appease it where
necessary.’ His unique ability to interpret and placate this power allows Summerisle to control and guard the purity of his island. It is a trick of rhetoric not limited to fiction. In a memorial speech for St George’s Day 1961, another charismatic orator invoked ‘our ancestors’ directly, imploring them to ‘tell us what it is that binds us together; show us the clue that leads through a thousand years; whisper to us the secret of this charmed life of England, that we in our time may know how to hold it fast’. Some years later this man, Enoch Powell, would deliver his inflammatory ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech, carving a discursive cleft through class and identity with which modern Britain still wrestles today. Being long dead, it seems, is of no consequence; our ancestors can be summoned to aid and abet just about any agenda, especially when a touch of romantic nationalism may help to grease the wheels.
This is, I think, what thrills me about the genre that began in Britain but has become known worldwide as ‘folk horror’. The menace feels so acute because real monsters do tread this green and pleasant land. It is a genre of obsession, and in that way mirrors Britain’s perpetual fascination with itself. Dual preoccupations – a mythic Albion of spellbinding legends and glorious sovereignty, and deeply embedded systems of class and rule – mould and inform, in a Powellian echo, ‘what it means to be British’. In folk horror the soil beneath our feet is seismically unstable. Our closest kin are unknowable and depraved, bound by unseen influences. As folk horror often examines belief, the very keystone of our identities, the moral
Introduction
peril is genuine. That we may be bewitched by the stirring words of a convincing populist, or fall into mass psychogenic hysteria, or take for granted ancient narratives of which we have little understanding, keeps us on our toes. Nothing can be relied upon.
Storytelling has always been one of our favourite pastimes and Britain’s bursting catalogue of folklore has provided plenty of grist for the mill. It might be said that folklore, as distinct from recorded history, is a type of collective social memory. Memory, subject to glitches and distortion, is naturally imperfect; but its capacity to capture experience and emotion offers its own sort of truth. A shared repository of familiar archetypes and narratives fosters a sense of community and belonging. Stories may become amulets for regional groups and, over time, the ingredients of national identity.
Unfortunately, tradition has been invoked to defend all sorts of cynical examples of British ‘cultural heritage’, from fox-hunting to blackface to smacking your kids.
In online spaces, folk imagery, wistfulness for unspoilt landscape and appeals to ‘indigenous’ pride are used as dog-whistles to further the ethnonationalist fantasies of the far right. So it is essential that we define what folk horror is, and what it is not.
More so than the gothic mode, folk horror’s rules are pliable, its parameters sometimes tricky to pin down. That said, there are some elements that recur: settings are very often isolated and insular; there may be pressure exerted by some form of ancient darkness that is linked
to landscape; and shared reality can exist alongside an alternative one of myth and folklore. While the rural usually predominates, folk memory exists wherever people do, and so an urban setting is not incompatible. It is very much not Christian; the ‘old ways’, pagan ritual and occultism may be found bristling beneath the surface. The horror element can be unsettling and uncanny; the assault can be psychological or even spiritual, rather than bodily or gratuitous (though these may feature). Supernatural elements are often present but are not required; the antagonist may reside within the rigidity of superstition or the madness of the crowd. Folk horror frequently offers incidental beauty. It is enraptured by nature. Most of all, it is concerned with a fear of outsiders and a clash of cultures.
The coinage of the term ‘folk horror’ is unclear, though scholar of the genre Dr Dawn Keetley attributes the first mention in print to a 1970 trade publication Kine Weekly in advance of the theatrical release of The Blood on Satan’s Claw. The film, directed by Piers Haggard, forms one corner of what Adam Scovell terms the ‘unholy trinity’ of folk horror’s origins, the others being Witchfinder General (dir. Michael Reeves, 1968) and Robin Hardy’s cult masterpiece, The Wicker Man. 1 Many consider the latter the urtext of the genre, and the very best of independent British filmmaking in the 1970s.
This vanguard is often described as folk horror’s first wave, even if what would become the genre’s recognisable motifs were already in the water. TV productions
Introduction such as The Owl Service (1969–70), Penda’s Fen (1974) and Children of the Stones (1977), and the Hammer films The Witches (dir. Cyril Frankel, 1966) and The Devil Rides Out (dir. Terence Fisher, 1968), fermented a paradigm shift for horror aficionados fed up with gothic clichés. Meanwhile, delirious public information films and the BBC ’s A Ghost Story for Christmas pitched their disquieting images into Britain’s living rooms.
Though the first wave of British folk horror played out predominantly on screen in the sixties and seventies, its filmmakers were drawing on literary influences much older. Arthur Machen’s The Great God Pan (1894) was inspired by the author’s terror amidst the ‘strange relics’ of a pagan temple in Wales. M. R. James spent the early decades of the twentieth century horrifying audiences with his fireside tales, most memorably among them ‘Oh, Whistle, and I’ll Come to You, My Lad’ and ‘A Warning to the Curious’. After the war, John Wyndham took up the mantle, his fascination with ritual and the terror of group-think particularly present in The Midwich Cuckoos (1957) and The Chrysalids (1955), the latter an early atomic horror. Inspiration may also be assumed from the haunted locales and harrowed souls imagined by Robert Aickman, Alan Garner and his many works of folk fantasy, as well as master of the occult thriller Dennis Wheatley, and in the US , Washington Irving, Thomas Tryon and Shirley Jackson’s short story ‘The Lottery’.
Folk horror’s second wave began a few years into the new century, with particular touchpoints being the films
of Ben Wheatley (Kill List, Sightseers, A Field in England, In the Earth ), Ari Aster (Hereditary, Midsommar ), Alex Garland (Annihilation, Men ) and Robert Eggers’s 2015 feature The VVitch. In literature, notable works from Andrew Michael Hurley, Adam Nevill, Sarah Moss and Benjamin Myers found much popular and critical praise. Folk horror’s resurgence has coalesced around an active online community and has been supported by an explosion in zines and small presses, as well as more esoteric projects like ‘Hookland’ and ‘Scarfolk’, both reflecting a woozy nostalgia for a lost temporal landscape in post-war Britain. As folk horror becomes mainstream we have seen the aesthetics of the genre spreading out across material culture, with Summerisle inspiring the catwalks of designers Gareth Pugh and Luella Bartley, and artist Jeremy Deller’s inflatable Stonehenge Sacrilege at the 2012 London Olympic games. Folk horror broke the billion-dollar bracket when Taylor Swift and her dancers were cloaked in ritual robes and steeped in ethereal mist during one segment of the singer’s Eras tour.
More recently, folk horror’s most visible examples have grappled with anthropogenic climate change. Fuelling this period of revival, then, may be the impulse in times of uncertainty to look to ‘ancient wisdom’ for answers, combined with the nauseous suspense of living through self-imposed and irreversible ecological collapse. Whatever the reason for its current popularity, as Hurley himself writes in the introduction to the folk horror anthology The Fiends in the Furrows II (2020), the
Introduction
so-called first wave never self-consciously titled itself ‘folk horror’. Our analysis of it is retrofitted, meaning those working in the genre today are at its forefront. Many of its most exciting writers are contributors to the collection you are about to read.
In The Wicker Man, Sergeant Howie, played by Edward Woodward, represents chastity, Protestant repression and paternalist normativity, and is set up entirely to collide with Summerisle’s heathen inhabitants: godless, liberated and pleasure-seeking. In this disturbing tale of human sacrifice, an almost throwaway line in the film’s final scenes has always fascinated me. Being led to the pyre, about to die, Howie thrashes amid the baying crowd, shouting, ‘If the crops fail, Summerisle, next year your people will kill you on May Day!’ The brief look of panic on the face of Lord Summerisle betrays an overlooked dimension of The Wicker Man. The whole project a confection of his industrialist grandfather, Summerisle does not actually believe in the ‘Old Gods’ in whose honour he has constructed his cult island; the story is kept alive so that his idiot peasants do not turn on him and storm the gates of his tropical mansion. They perform their brutal ritual not because they are savage and unenlightened, but because they have been socially engineered. Distracted so as not to notice they are scrabbling in the dirt for hot pennies. Inequality has always been a part of Britain’s fabric,
with the possession of land and wealth hereditarily preserved. If folk culture is the memory of human experience, it is reasonable to expect these divisions to bubble up in our stories and traditions. Medieval England found this so self-evident as to have turned it into a joke; each year a ‘Lord of Misrule’ was appointed from the peasantry to poke fun at his betters during the Feast of Fools. Because of course: a member of the underclass given fleeting impunity to masquerade dignity and power over nobility, what could be more absurd?
In Workers’ Tales: Socialist Fairy Tales, Fables, and Allegories from Great Britain, Michael Rosen brings together some of the fantastical narratives that informed the foundations of the labour movement. It’s not as unlikely a combination as it first appears; to the uninitiated, a public speaker delivering a tract by Karl Marx or Rosa Luxemburg could well be too abstract and dry to inspire action. But by using the formats of children’s literature, stories familiar to all, the inequalities and hypocrisies of the British class system could be revealed plainly. Such was their effectiveness that many of these narratives found their way into publications like the Clarion, William Morris’s Commonweal and the Workmen’s Times. Keir Hardie used such stories up and down the country while campaigning for his Independent Labour Party and ended up being a prolific writer of them himself.
Many of these fables centre the rural labourer and indentured serf, the indispensable agricultural workers whose toil made the industrial revolution possible. The
Introduction
sunlit pastoralism of academy art and highbred poetry promoted the peasant experience as one of simple living surrounded by bucolic symbols, making a pretty image of something that has held critical significance to centuries of ordinary people: the harvest. It was the harvest that governed the whole year, a calendar event which brought with it the annual reassurance of survival. When a person’s chances in life are sealed by an accident of birth it’s no coincidence that it is the pitchfork that has become the most familiar totem of the angry mob.
In folk horror, meanwhile, class narratives may be overt or covert. We see this most often in differing claims to the ownership of land. Idyllic and isolated rural communities are frequently depicted as deeply connected to the land and its traditions, a kinship that is underestimated by meddlesome outsiders soon to meet their end. Alternatively, the rural working class may become victims of dark rituals or manipulations by malevolent entities, reflecting themes of powerlessness and vulnerability in the face of forces beyond their control. Indeed, throughout history the poor have suffered indignities both natural and unnatural, whether force majeure or being indentured to a lord or via religious suppressions of personal liberty. Widows and suspiciously unwed women have especially met with persecution, and the scold’s bridle and other ways of shutting people up have cast a long shadow in the folk imagination. Behind each example you don’t have to look hard to find a vested interest. It is a deep and murky well.
All this makes folk horror supreme in exploring revolt. The genre gives anthropomorphic voice to an earth assumed to be inert. It grants magical powers to the most downtrodden, wretched and witch-hunted. It finds the uncanny in the clash between different socioeconomic worlds. It offers up a high-born sacrifice on a sea of pitchforks. Folk horror narratives may also explore the impact of economic decline on rural communities, as external pressures force them into desperate acts or dark pacts to survive. Out of desperation of grinding poverty, yes, but sometimes by unleashing a glorious flex of collective power.
Of course, history is written by the literate. The vast majority of our forebears are lost forever, not even present in the marginalia. But if we look hard across Britain’s landscape, we see evidence of ordinary people persisting, and resisting too. The Chartists, who sensed the power of Calderdale’s ancient Basin Stones when they gathered there in the summer of 1842 to foment their general strike. The folk balladeers, whose music has a strong history of protest and rebellion, and which proliferated widely because its style is easily learnt without requiring literacy. Apocryphally, the megaliths of Stonehenge are said to have been erected in honour of Boudicca, whose lowborn followers wished to ensure that a symbol of their defiance against the Romans would stand for all time. There are echoes in our calendar too. May Day, the fire festival of the agrarian calendar, a day of feasting and indulgence, was once so closely associated with the folk
Introduction
figure Robin Hood that illegitimate babies conceived on the day were known as ‘sons of Robin’. These boys often grew up to be outlaws, which originally referred to someone who had run away from serfdom. Of course, many now know May Day by another name: International Workers’ Day.
Remnants like these remind us that equality is a cause that requires active participation and visible representation. The Lord of Misrule was permitted to lampoon his real-life lords within the bounds of entertainment, but what if there was no ‘commoner’ to take on the role? A 2024 report by the Sutton Trust found that young people from socio-economic disadvantage are systemically blocked from earning a living in the creative sector,2 with research from the Creative Industries Policy and Evidence Centre finding that fewer than one in 10 arts workers comes from a working-class background.3 When art speaks from the same few overrepresented perspectives, culture withers. The contributors to this collection do so as a refusal against the project of marginalisation, and to force reflection on just whose interests are vested in maintaining a system of feast and famine.
Post-Farage Essex is the chosen hellscape of A. K. Blakemore, where the shifting sands of contemporary divisions encourages one woman’s slide into bonecavorting deviance. At the country’s westernmost extreme, Natasha Carthew’s Cornish islanders fight to endure as guardians both of a disused lighthouse and an unearthly secret. Like cautionary tales of campfires old,
Mark Stafford’s mirror-world Dorset reminds us why we should never eat the food of the faery world, however tempting. In ‘Carole’, a clutching, mud-bound horror of loss, Emma Glass takes us on a pilgrimage through devastating terrain right to the bog-riddled borderlands. Unstable earth marks the very centre of England, a fitting stage for a familial psychodrama examining the ritual roles we so often create for ourselves, in Jenn Ashworth’s Pendle Hill requiem. Hauntology, folk horror’s sister genre exploring phantoms looped in time and place, is the brooding premise to Tom Benn’s psychogeographic music-hall spectacle located in a ‘Hellmouth north of Halifax’. My own story, ‘Yellowbelly’, the slang term for a person from Lincolnshire and here a tidy short-hand for male gutlessness, takes working-class fetishisation to tasteless ends. Rising from the ashes meanwhile, and proving folk horror needn’t be rural, is Salena Godden’s young Londoner witch and her talisman of revenge. Lastly, the winners of the Bog People competition for unpublished working-class writers: Mark Colbourne’s retrospective of tragedy-blighted 1970s folk-rockers Heptagonal Sons, and a queasily flavoured tale of fraternal chest-beating from Daniel Draper. Both are presented here in print for the first time.
A note on class. The most recent large-scale study into class in the UK , conducted by the BBC in conjunction
Introduction
with Manchester University and the London School of Economics, determined that ‘the working class’ is today more complex than traditional definitions used by sociologists in the twentieth century.4 After many decades of demographic change through de-industrialisation, global migration and a greater percentage of women entering the workforce, the old yardsticks of home ownership, occupation and education level have become too simplistic. Self-identification, meanwhile, brings its own challenges and limitations. For the purposes of this collection contributors were asked to consider if they grew up in circumstances of low social, cultural and economic capital and/or asset wealth, and that regardless of their current circumstances and lifestyle that they could write authentically from that point of view. All contributing bog people, including me, have been paid equally.
Defining class may be complicated and often fraught, but that some of us exist in significantly different realities to others is as clear as day. The project of uplifting the world’s poorest has stagnated, while Oxfam’s most recent survey of global inequality predicts that the world will have its first trillionaire within the decade.5 In the UK today, 4.2 million children live in poverty.6 Such extravagant injustice demands our sustained attention. In place of explanation, we are spun fables about the working poor being indolent, told that striking for above-inflation wages and labour protections is grasping and uncivilised. Space is ceded for bad-faith political insurgents speaking in mimicked concern for Britain’s future, warning any
compassion towards refugees and economic migrants invites a river of blood; or for a serving prime minister to suggest that global pandemics are ‘just nature’s way of dealing with old people’.7 Stories are still being used to incite, to divide and to kill.
The great unwashed has always been an inconvenience, the grubby workers’ hands on the wheels of commerce an understood necessity, though an unsightly one. Those vested in the maintenance of capital-driven systems of control have worked hard to distract from one of history’s most abiding truths: that there are more of us than them. So often in folk horror narratives we see a culmination of an aberrant individual or group suppressed by the multitude. In this moment it is the perfect genre to glimpse an exhilarating role reversal, to provoke a change of regime. To conjure together a Feast of Fools that endures beyond dawn.
With Bog People we excavate the mud-bound relics and restore the great unwashed. In its pages we recognise the countless dead unnamed by the chroniclers of history; the poor, but also women, people of colour, marginal identities, the voices of the colonised, silent and suppressed. Together we will relearn the disruptive potential of stories to upend fortresses of power. Stories of reaping and sowing, stories that turn the staid soil so something fresh can grow from it, stories as sharp as a guillotine blade, stories to persist for all time.
Hollie Starling London, May Day 2025
1. The Wicker Man (1973), directed by Robin Hardy, screenplay by Anthony Shaffer inspired by the novel Ritual (1967) by David Pinner. Produced by British Lion Films.
2. ‘Social Mobility: The Next Generation’, Sutton Trust, June 2023, www.suttontrust.com/wp-content/uploads/ 2023/06/ Social- Mobility- The- Next- Generation- LostPotential-Age-16.pdf
3. ‘Fewer than one in 10 arts workers in UK have workingclass roots’, Guardian, May 2024, www.theguardian. com/inequality/article/2024/may/18/ arts- workersuk-working-class-roots-cultural-sector-diversity
4. ‘Huge survey reveals seven social classes in UK ’, BBC News, April 2013, www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk22007058
5. ‘Inequality Inc.’, Oxfam, January 2024, policy-practice. oxfam.org/resources/ inequality- inc- how- corporatepower- divides- our- world- and- the- need- for- a- newera-621583/
6. ‘UK Poverty 2024’, Joseph Rowntree Foundation, January 2024, www.jrf.org.uk/uk-poverty-2024-theessential-guide-to-understanding-poverty-in-the-uk
7. Quote: Sir Patrick Vallance, Coronavirus public inquiry, BBC News, October 2023, www.bbc.co.uk/ news/uk-politics-67278517
The Ossuary
a .K. b la K emore
A. K. Blakemore is a poet and novelist based in north Essex. Her novels include The Manningtree Witches (Granta, 2021) – winner of the Desmond Elliott Prize for Best Debut Novel, and shortlisted for the Costa First Novel Award and the Royal Society of Literature’s Ondaatje Prize – and The Glutton (Granta, 2023), shortlisted for the Dylan Thomas Prize. Her full-length poetry collections are Fondue (Offord Road Books, 2018) and Humbert Summer (Eyewear, 2015). Her work has been widely published and anthologised, appearing in the Poetry Review, London Review of Books, Guardian and White Review, among others.
mon D a Y
The ossuary of Saint Andrew’s Church, in north Essex, contains one of the largest collections of ancient human skulls in the United Kingdom. It is open to visitors from eleven in the morning to four o’clock in the afternoon, Monday through to Saturday, April to September. During this time, it is staffed by volunteers from the local community. Well, one volunteer really. Or so the vicar, Father Daniels, jokes. She is an eighty-year-old woman. A retiree, named Shirley – always Shirley, never Shirl – Lister. Every morning of the ‘tourist season’ – such as it is, in this mildewed and flaking coastal town – whether rain or shine, Shirley Lister arrives at Saint Andrew’s in her neat, comfortable slip-on shoes at precisely 10:45. She opens the ossuary, round the back of the church, with the spare key she has been entrusted with. She will find, laid out tidily on the fibreboard desk at the entrance: a small steel lockbox for the cash float; a sheaf of glossy pamphlets in
a plastic container; a box of tissues; a broken chunk of brick with which to wedge the heavy door open when it’s warm out; a little metallic bell of the kind found on hotel reception desks, which can be used to summon Shirley to attendance (though this has never really been necessary); and a laminated sheet of A4 paper displaying the price of admittance. It reads:
£4 a DU lts
£2 CH il D (to be a CC ompanie D at all times b Y an a DU lt )
£3 pensionsers , st UD ents & all ot H er
C on C essions
(‘St Andrew’s Church Ossuary’ scrolling across in a font the vicar had chosen – Blackadder ITC , which seemed fitting.) Shirley supposes that ‘other concessions’ means the unemployed. The between jobs. The idlers. Truth be told, in all her six years of volunteering at Saint Andrew’s, it’s never come up. Pensioners – or ‘pensionsers’, as the price list would have them – doubtless form the majority of their daily traffic, padding round the room from bay to vaulted bay of the tarnished, gap-jawed skulls with a quiet reverence. Polyurethane handbags and lipstick on their dentures.
Students? They come in every now and then. Primarily the ‘gothic’ type, so-called. That’s how Shirley thinks of them, though it’s probably not what they’d call themselves these days. She’s not up on the lingo, and nor would she wish to be. In long fringed skirts and stacks
The Ossuary of silver rings. Little enamelled badges of rainbow flags on their backpacks. Trying to take pictures with their mobile telephones – always encased in glittering, bumpy plastic – so that Shirley must clear her throat and tap the sign. So disrespectful.
The unemployed? Well. When hell freezes over, perhaps. Why spend £3 of your giro on heritage when it could go towards a pack of cigarettes, or an ugly tattoo?
Shirley Lister is getting older now. And so the now seems to slip out of view, sometimes. Pocking and bubbling like the skin on milk. She likes the ossuary, not only because the demographic of its patrons corroborates her pre-existing prejudices, but because it is peaceful, and still. She likes the routine of it. She sits here, day after day, on her stiff plastic chair, and watches the world go by. In sun and in rain. The world, she is sorry to report, seems mainly made up of absurdly fat women with plastic shopping bags and nose rings, immigrants and spotty children exhaling clouds of lemon-scented vapour.
She turns her phone off when she arrives at the ossuary in the morning and doesn’t switch it on again until she gets home, around five, and begins heating up her supper on the hob. Nets over the kitchen window getting dirty again, greying.
An alert flashes up on the screen: a missed call from Nathaniel. A little later, Shirley rings him back. The first episode of Springwatch, on mute, and the cat in her lap.
He asks about her day. She tells him, in so many words, that she is sorry to say the world seems mainly made up of
absurdly fat women with plastic shopping bags and nose rings, immigrants and spotty children exhaling clouds of lemon-scented vapour. He calls her a racist. Her only son.
Well, she answers. She’s got a fridge full of insulin, if she ever does decide to end it all. It’s not as though anyone would care, she says. It’s not as though anyone would miss me.
You’re a fucking vile woman, Nathaniel says. You know that? And then he hangs up. On the screen, a juvenile goldfinch parts its little beak, and flits from bough to bough.
t U es D a Y
Her knees know when the weather will be bad. Noon, and not a single visitor yet. It’s the rain that’s keeping them away, of course. The April shower riffling through the leaves of the big sycamore in the churchyard, and the metallic, rolling sound of distant thunder.
Sat at the desk, Shirley takes out the KitKat she has in her handbag to keep her glucose levels up, in case of emergencies. She ought not to eat it really, but after yesterday’s phone call with Nathaniel she feels she owes herself a treat. Nibbling on a wafer, she thumbs through a glossy pamphlet. The earliest remains, it says, housed in St Andrew’s charnel date from the fourteenth century. It is estimated that the collection consists of the bones of over two thousand individuals. She has this all by memory now.
A 1998 project by osteologists based at Essex University provided a demographic analysis of all the skulls on the shelves,
The Ossuary revealing a higher proportion of male than female skulls, but it is unclear where most of the individuals housed in the charnel originated. A scarlet starburst on the corner of the second page offers a smug DID -YOU -KNOW : Medieval peasants sometimes kept parts of their dead relatives’ bodies around their homes. This was thought to help attract good luck for the surviving members of the family!!
It’s not just the bones that intrigue her, but the words that go with them: talus, de-flesh, calvarium, sub-adult. For cold beauty, they almost match the bones themselves. With twenty minutes to go until closing time, Shirley has them all to herself. Brushing the crumbs from her pleated skirt, she rises to her feet.
Within the ossuary, the bones are arranged in arched bays, along shelves carved deep into the pale stone from floor to ceiling. At the apex of each bay, a single skull; then two; then five; then ten, as the shelves widen, to accommodate as many as twenty-five at floor level. Although it’s the skulls that draw the most admiration, they’ve other bones kept in the ossuary too. A long iron trough filled with thigh bones, bleached and bulbous at the ends: a classic bone, the femur. The kind of bone a puppy dog might slobber over in a cartoon. Shirley has always found the pelvises and scapulae particularly appealing, orchidaceous and palely fluted. The vertebrae have a pleasingly ergonomic sort of quality. They put her in mind of a set of stacking resin cocktail glasses her great-aunt Barbara bought her as a wedding gift in the late sixties, now up in the attic.
