London's older inhabitants are still there, but the luckiest people never see them.

For those who do notice, they keep a bookshop in Bloomsbury that's only there sometimes. They run a frost fair on the frozen Thames. They live in the cellar of a Wapping pub and in the soot-filled flues of a Blackheath Victorian terrace and in the dark water under the Regent's Canal.

It's fair to say that they take an interest in the living — in writers who have run out of ideas, journalists who have run out of stories, publicans who want a little more than the brewery can offer, couples whose compassion isn't what it seems. And they are entirely, by nature, unmoved by human suffering.

The London Fae is a novel in stories — a mythopoetic portrait of a city haunted not by the benign and whimsical but by forces that are ancient, exacting, and without mercy. The bargains in these stories are real. The blood debts accrue. The reckonings, when they come, are calibrated precisely to the particular way each person chose not to be honest with themselves.

Spindledrift Goodfellow keeps his books. Jenny Greenteeth keeps her canal. Ned Ludd haunts the underground railway. Queen Mab keeps her theatre of forgetting, and does not care in the least what the tickets cost her audience.

Only at the city's stone heart does something stranger and more ambiguous stir — something that, for those paying attention, might bring something closer to hope.

Dark, funny, and rooted in genuine scholarship, The London Fae asks what it would mean to live in a city where we still owe the old ones their due, and whether any of us are honest enough to settle our account.

The Classic Ghost Stories Podcast