This month I’m talking to Lyndsey Croal about her luminous and fantastical book Dark Crescent, which was published by Luna Press Publishing in June 2025. This collection brings together short stories (and a novella) inspired by Scottish mythology including some well known favourites, such as kelpies and selkies, to much lesser known stories like the frittening (a malevolent sea blob, my personal favourite). Following the changing seasons of the year, this is a beautifully crafted collection, with each story inseparable from the landscape which inspired it.
Lyndsey is a Scottish author published in over eighty magazines and anthologies, including Apex, Analog, Weird Tales, and Mslexia’s Best Women’s Short Fiction. She’s a Scottish Book Trust New Writers Awardee, Shirley Jackson Award and British Fantasy Award Finalist, and former Hawthornden Fellow. Her longer works include Have You Decided on Your Question (Shortwave), Limelight and Other Stories (Shortwave) The Girl With Barnacles for Eyes (Split Scream Volume Five, Tenebrous Press), and Dark Crescent (Luna Press).
Rebecca Summerling: Hi Lyndsey, thanks so much for chatting to us about Dark Crescent! As we approach autumn here in the northern hemisphere, I thought we could start by talking about that section of the book. There is such a rich history of ghost telling in Scottish speculative writing and your collection brought to mind some others I’ve read like O Caledonia by Elspeth Barker and Pine by Francine Toon. In those works the dead feel very close to the living. What do you think it is about the country that inspires such dark and ghostly storytelling?
Lyndsey Croal: One of the things I love about Scottish folklore is the dark and ominous feel so many of the stories have, often relating to the afterlife, superstition, strange creatures, and hauntings. The stories also often touch on the nature of mortality and dealing with dark forces beyond our control. One of the things that I think evokes that darkness is the harshness and unpredictability of Scotland’s weather and landscapes, particularly in the Highlands and Islands where a lot of the darker folklore originates. The weather is so evocative and eerie at times – haar rolling off the sea, stormy skies, foggy and damp woodlands, harsh and frozen mountains in winter. And then you have the sea (one of my favourite settings to explore), and there’s so much dark nautical folk tales – often some of the most fearsome foes and monsters show the treachery of the seas. Scotland has a rich history of seafaring, and such creatures have cropped up to possibly explain shipwrecks or the dangers of being out at water. We also have quite a bloody history overall, with the idea that death could be just around the corner appearing in so many stories. These extremities may explain our tales, and also our darkest fears of living in such remoteness and unpredictability. They may also act as warnings against messing with nature, or what might happen if you don’t follow the normal rules. There’s also a really strong tradition of fae and fairy mythology, and ideas of the Otherworld – these stories are full of sacrifice, tricksters, mischief, and the lure of the unknown. We can’t help but want to see what might be out there beyond the “real”. It’s natural I think that dark stories appear now in more contemporary works when taking influence from these darker tales and the landscapes that inspire them!
One of my favourite stories in this collection is The Frittening in which a boatmaker is being haunted by a strange puddle that appears outside his home. Without spoiling the story, something I particularly enjoy about your work is the ambiguity in your endings. Traditionally folk stories always had a moralistic or educational purpose, that may not be as relevant to us now. What do you think we can take from folk stories today?
I’m so glad that The Frittening is a favourite, as it’s one of my own favourites! I think with that one, I wanted to leave some ambiguity because the story is about rumours and paranoia, and the suspicion of community – and the isolation that creates. I think isolation is a big thing that ended up coming through in the collection, because so many of the stories were written during the lockdown, where I was both craving an escape but feeling cut off from society and the natural world in many ways.
On folk tales today, because folklore is traditionally oral storytelling, these are stories that have been told in different forms for many years, probably adapting over time from that first time they might have been told. The reason I think many have stayed around is that so many of the lessons and themes are timeless. I think many of them were also warnings in some ways, about the power of nature, or about the dangers of giving in to temptation or darkness. I think that’s still relevant in its own way, and for me what I wanted to do with the modern reimaginings was to grasp onto some of that, but look at more about what we might lose when we mess with nature, and what’s at risk when we isolate ourselves from community. I usually try to make the distinction that Dark Crescent isn’t a book of retellings in the traditional sense, because I have taken quite a bit of liberty with some of the folklore – but for me there’s a beauty to that ability to take inspiration from a tale that’s been around for hundreds of years and subvert it in some way to hopefully engage with modern themes.
Aside from the mythology, what other works inspired you when you were writing these stories?
I’m going to answer this in a bit of a roundabout way, because I’m not sure I could pinpoint all the exact inspirations – but one of the things that originally got me fascinated with dark folklore was being obsessed with fairies when I was younger. I used to write to them and leave messages at the bird table with little gifts (they would write back, definitely not my mum), and I had a family friend who would tell stories of the fairies and mushroom circles, and there was always mischief or danger implied there. There was also a fairy visitor centre we went to every time we went up north to the Highlands to visit friends, before we ended up moving there. I definitely then took a lot of inspiration from these places I grew up in (I lived in a small coastal village in the northwest Highlands for most of my formative years!) and that feeling of rural life and harshness of landscapes and winters especially. One of the stories was inspired directly by the woods behind my house which were the exact origin of the myth of the Ghillie Dhu. For the Daughter of Fire and Water novella, I was inspired by the interpretation of the Cailleach myth by folklorist Donald Alexander Mackenzie, which is one of my favourite explorations of that mythology. I also enjoyed following Folklore Thursday online, and listening to The Folklore Podcast both of which I recommend, and there’s a bibliography at the back of the book for some more specific sources. Joanne Harris’s folklore and mythology writing was also a big inspiration for wanting to write similarly dark and strange tales, and so I was over the moon to get a blurb from her – just an author dream there!
This collection also includes your novella Daughter of Fire and Water, which is the perfect way to round out the book. Originally this was an audio drama. How did you go about adapting that into a novella?
I loved telling the story in the format of the audio drama, but by nature of that, it does mean the story has to fit within a certain frame and way of telling – you can’t get as much worldbuilding in compared to prose, or get as deep into the characters’ minds. And then Brida and Angus’s tale just kept rattling inside my head, and I couldn’t help but feel there was more to their story – and also more that Brida was hiding from herself and the reader (or listener) in the original audio drama. I really enjoyed the turning this into a longer work, to explore some more of the back story and elements that I wasn’t able to explore in the audio version. Some of the text and dialogue is the same, and the story itself follows the same plot, but I was able to introduce new elements to the story, including more details about the magic system, the world, and Brida’s history. The audio drama produced by Alternative Stories and Fake Realities remains one of my absolute favourite things I’ve worked on, but I loved getting the chance to delve back into it.
Your professional background is in climate and nature policy and communications and your passion for nature shines through so brightly in these stories. What role do you think ecofiction plays in shaping our understanding of the changing world around us?
I think eco-fiction can be a great way to bring readers along to think about our connection with nature and climate. With my professional background, I’ve had a lifelong passion for addressing climate change, and I think it’s going to be the biggest challenge we will face in coming years (alongside so many interconnected issues). I think exploring it in fiction gives us an opportunity to not just explore the consequences of climate change, but also allows us to highlight the importance of protecting the natural world. In more future-looking eco-fiction, it can also engage with alternative futures that could open up if we take real concerted action. It can present visions of powerful futures, imaginative solutions, and pose ideas around the communities we could live in if we truly faced up to the crisis we’re in.
While a lot of my short fiction is more sci-fi leaning, for Dark Crescent, the storytelling tradition was slightly different for me in how I wanted to engage with eco themes. Folklore is already so steeped in the natural world and wilderness, so exploring nature, its power, and impact felt like an obvious way to explore some of the reimaginings in the collection. Scotland also has a landscape that for a long time was more nature’s dominion than it was ours, and with these stories there’s often the idea that to fight back against nature would lead to our downfall – a concept of respecting our natural world we could learn from. Now, Scotland still has such rich nature and wildlife, but it’s being threatened by land use and climate change, and in some of the stories I wanted to use folklore as a climate allegory, with nature often personified. I guess I want people to see that through these stories, the beauty and potential for the power of nature.
I love that you included a further reading section in the book and I’d like to ask for some more reading recommendations! What other contemporary books do you feel embody the spirit of Scottish folklore?
Absolutely happy to talk about more folklore fiction! The Bone Diver by Angie Spoto is a brilliant gothic subversion of the selkie myth, and Joanne Harris also wrote an excellent selkie book Blue Salt Road. Kirsty Logan’s The Gloaming is beautifully dark, as is her short fiction. I’d also recommend author Lorraine Wilson – her work is often steeped in folklore, including with Scottish inspiration, and Shona Kinsella’s The Heart of Winter and Daughters of Nicnevin. For gothic reads that have Scottish settings and some folkloric influences, I’d recommend C.J. Cooke’s books, and MK Hardy’s The Needfire. Other folklore reads I’ve loved (not Scottish ones), but Gorse by Sam K Horton, Folk by Zoe Gilbert, Starve Acre by Andrew Michael Hurley, Wakenhyrst by Michelle Paver, and Sistersong by Lucy Holland.
Can you share anything that you’re working on at the moment? What’s next for you?
My next book In This City, Where it Rains is out in February also with Luna Press. It’s a Scottish gothic horror novella, with some folklore and occult influences, set in a city cursed by forgetting and eternal rain, and a woman that can see ghosts that only appear in the rain. It also has a classic gothic house setting, family secrets, rituals, and weird moths. It should be up for pre-order soon! I’m also hoping my next book after that will be a novel and I’m on submission for a couple of projects that are more dark sci-fi leaning – including a weird near-future deep sea eco thriller book (I’m keeping all fingers crossed for that one as I think it’s the best thing I’ve written and it was a project I loved doing!) I’ve just started a new space moss horror book, again leaning heavily into the biological horrors and eco themes!