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Tales Of Woe: Collected Short Stories (Volume 2)

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This collection of twelve short stories has themes of family, ghosts, magic and myth, poverty, mental illness and charity. Some of the stories are connected to each other, or have similar characters, so that the stories as a collection form an entertaining and engrossing anthology. The author is also a poet, and some of her poems feature in the stories, or link the tales together. She has a good sense of character and place, and her tales are set in many different places and time periods, from 1560s to 1860s to 1960s and in places as diverse as Cafarthfa Castle in Wales, London, Paris, Rome and a magical island that cannot be found on any map.

This island features in two of the stories, The Island of Jewels and The Mysterious Island, and in both cases the characters are banished there by the Gods for wanting to be something they are not. On the island they are to learn to be grateful for what and who they are, and this theme is echoed in the other stories, as in Is Life What you Make It, where Constance has continual bad luck in contrast to her wealthy sister, and also Poverty House in which young Connie has to steal things to improve her life and that of her sisters. Sisterhood is also featured widely in the stories, with four of the tales having three sisters, of whom one is the principal character.

One of the most engrossing stories is The Ballerina and the Shoemaker, in which a young ballerina asks a shoemaker to maker her some ballet shoes. However, she never returns for them, so the shoemaker goes to where she is supposed to be performing and discovers that she has been killed by a tram. An old woman at the theatre tells him that she was a talented and promising dancer but was obsessed with her own mortality and always wanted to be buried with her ballet shoes. That night, the shoemaker is visited by the ballerina's ghost, who continues to plague him and the opera house until the shoes are hung on her grave. A poem on her grave stone reads, "My face will never grow old while I'm sleeping; As my spirit is entrusted to God's keeping." This poem, The Mirror of My Youth, links this story to that of The Mont Blanc Pen, in which a lonely old man, Francis, begins to write wonderful and strange poetry after being given a beautiful pen by a friend. The words do not seem to come from his own imagination, but rather through a ghost or spirit who delivers the words to him, two lines at a time. The old man cannot cope and soon suffers a nervous breakdown, and is admitted to a mental hospital.
A similar fate befalls no less than three characters in these stories, two of whom are poets or writers, and indeed a fair number of the stories have suffering as their theme -the woman whose house is about to be repossessed; the son abandoned by his mother for his deformities; the man whose generosity and charity backfires when he loses all his money. The recurring themes give the collection a pleasing symmetry.

O'Sullivan's poetry is very good, and the way in which she incorporates it into the stories is subtle and stylish. it is of a very different tone to her prose, proving she is a talented writer in different mediums. This is an enjoyable collection of short stories, on interesting and varied subjects.