Title: THE RED GROUSE TALES
Author: Leslie Garland
ASIN: B018VWOVIU
Publisher: Self-published
Pages: 343
Source: Review copy from the author
The Little Dog and other stories. Told in The Red Grouse Inn, the universal appeal of these four charming, very different, adult, speculative, spiritual and philosophical tales will intrigue and entertain. With beautiful and atmospheric imagery, surreal and paranormal concepts of angels, ghosts and devils, they will have you guessing, turning the pages and looking forward to the next one.
The Little Dog – a story of good and evil and retribution. Bill, a retired forester, recounts a week in his early working life when he was paired with an unsavoury workmate. This commences with them finding a little domestic dog sitting beside a forest haul-road way out in a remote part of the forest, but what is a little dog doing in such an unlikely location? As the week goes on it becomes increasingly uncomfortable, the little dog disappears, events take an unexpected turn and our young troubled and naive Bill starts to learn some awful truths.
The Golden Tup – a dreadful tale of paradise being cruelly taken by latent evil. This tale opens with the shocking news that a nice young couple has killed their newborn baby. How could they have done such a dreadful thing? Our narrator, Verity, recalls how the pair bought an old derelict farmhouse and commenced renovating it; creating their own paradise. However, their felling an old tree changed everything.
The Crow – a poignant tale of misunderstanding, dying, bitterness and blame. As a child, David is taken to a hospice by his mother where he finds himself listening to an increasingly mad tale told by a dying and embittered old Irish priest. But why do the old priest’s recollections of the school days and subsequent rise of a local councillor become so increasingly bizarre and bitter?
The White Hart – a happy ghost story, if there can be such a thing! What might connect a chance encounter with a little albino deer, an equally unexpected meeting with a beautiful, but somewhat enigmatic young girl in a remote chapel, and a third, just as strange an incident, on a windswept hillside? Pete Montague, relates a redemptive, adult, speculative, spiritual and philosophical happy ghost story – if there can be such a thing!
Official Summary
Warning to sensitive readers: some tales do contain a tiny bit of bad language and references to sex
The little dog is told by Bill, it is a story about when he first started working as a forester. He gets paired with Blackman, a man who no one likes at work.
This story, in the beginning, was painfully slow. I know it was an old man talking and it sure felt like it. However, the story itself was actually quite interesting. I loved how we didn’t know if Blackman was crazy or just misunderstood. However, I didn’t love all the unanswered questions this story left me with.
The Crow focuses on a local politician, but the tale of his life as related by a priest casts doubt on his motives.
This story honestly made me sad. The bullies were so cruel in this book. I also didn’t like that once the boy started to gain any sort of confidence Father Patrick thinks he is possessed by the devil.
Although I like how it is said by David that the story isn’t that accurate and is a little distorted.
The White Hart. This story is told by Pete, the tale is his encounter with an albino deer and ghost experience.
This story is feel-good and although I don’t believe in ghosts it was very heartwarming and I think this story was my favourite in the whole book.
The Golden Tup. The Golden Tup is the story of a nearby couple who are infamous for having killed their child. Although, just maybe not all things are as it appears.
This one was probably the one that creeped me out the most, I think it didn’t help that I read this one at 11 pm. This one had me hooked I read the whole story in about an hour. I would honestly recommend people get a copy of this book for this one story. I also loved how Verity told the story.
All these stories are told from The Red Grouse Inn where a group of friends meet every Thursday to have a few pints and tell old stories.
Despite the stories being exceptionally slow, once you got into them they were great. Overall I loved how the book took on some serious topics and how well they were all handled. I would definitely recommend this book.
I didn’t start out in a career in writing; I qualified as a Chartered Civil Engineer. In this capacity, I worked for several years on projects in the UK, the Far East and Africa. During this period I won the Institution of Civil Engineers ‘Miller Prize’ for a paper on tunnelling. Perhaps my first foray into writing? It was a pretty dry technical piece. However, my experience in tunnelling has given me an exciting idea for a story which I hope will be a lot more fun than my engineering paper and I have just recently made a start on this. Changing times resulted in a change in direction and after qualifying as an Associate Member of both the British Institute of Professional Photography and the Royal Photographic Society, started my own stock photograph library (the first in N.E.England) and wrote for the trade press. The Internet was new in those days and not very reliable. So an unexpected break in my Internet connection fortuitously presented the time to make a start on a long-cherished project of a series of novella length stories, and the first story of The Red Grouse Tales was drafted. Three more ‘tales’ followed and I published The Red Grouse Tales in 2016. Since then I have completed a further three novellas and a novel. Right now I am trying to complete a second batch of ‘tales’ and planning a trilogy.
Thanks for reading let me know what you think in the comments below.
Goodbye, my little book nerds…
