Long Lankin by John Banville.
The Gallery Press, revised edition 1984 (1970).

She watched him go away down the road. He did not look back, and soon he was gone around a bend. She turned and walked slowly up the hill. The sun had fallen behind the mountains, and the clouds, like bruised blood, were massing.
— ‘The Visit’.

As a former folkie I’ve long been aware of a widespread folk ballad called ‘Long Lankin’ (or variants such as ‘Cruel Lincoln’) since at least the 1970s. It’s a spooky and bloody tale of a man who breaks into a castle, for reasons which are not always clear: some versions suggest he’s a mason who’s not been paid by the castle’s lord for work he’s done, others that he’s also a leper. He somehow persuades the nurse in charge of the lord’s child to let him bleed the lord’s child to death before murdering the wife; whether it’s for some ritual purpose or for revenge is rarely made clear but eventually the false nurse and the vengeful intruder have to meet justice.

I say all this because, like many surviving folk ballads of some antiquity in which motivations are not often clear or there exist lacunae in the telling, the nine pieces in John Banville’s collection of short stories (most of which first appeared in 1970) also have the same unnerving feel: we may arrive in the middle of a situation, and key information about the participants and their relationships can be withheld or remain ambiguous, while there also remains a general sense of menace throughout, of mysteries vaguely alluded to, of crises unresolved.

As a debut publication it’s impressive, and even in this revised edition (with a 1984 tale substituted for two of the original ten stories) it remains haunting and suspenseful. And, in keeping with the cryptic nature of the texts, none of the pieces, either directly or indirectly, seems to reference the ballad of the collection’s title.