'Holiday Reading'

We continue with Rosalie Parker's new collection, and a story set in moderately familiar territory - the English provincial town. In this case it's a town which hold a book fair every August. A visitor, Callum, is slightly bemused to find so many hardback volumes on obscure topics. He reads the blurb on a supernatural romance, decides not to buy it. But it plants a seed.

Callum has suffered burnout in the workplace and his doctor (in a throwback to many a classic tale) has prescribed a holiday. Callum rejects his wife's suggestion of a tropical vacation, and leaves her to take a break in the UK. But when he has already visited two of the town's three main attractions on the first day he begins to fear boredom will replace chronic stress. But when he visits the ancient abbey he encounters a young woman who provides him with quite a bit of fun.

I'm not quite sure where to place this tale in terms of sub-genre. By the same token, Callum is not quite a victim or a villain, here, but somewhere between. His decision to buy some spicy volumes from a book dealer implies that he is culpable, but his fragile emotional state provides some leeway. Perhaps the key point is that Rosalie Parker seems to get a lot more out of book fairs than the rest of us. This is also a more upbeat book than the last story, showing how well the author shapes the short-short format to her ends.

Stay tuned - next one is the book's title story.