Queens of the Crone Age by Tracy Fahey: The Finest Irish Folk Horror

The crone stops being the monster and starts telling the story.

Tracy Fahey has spent her career pulling Irish folklore up into the present, and Queens of the Crone Age is the fullest thing she has built from it yet. This PS Publishing collection wakes the Cailleach, the ancient Hag of Beara, and uses her stirring as the frame for a run of stories about older women the world tried to forget. It is feminist folk horror with stone in its bones, steeped in Irish mythology and quiet, accumulating dread. In this review I get into how Fahey turns the crone from monster into storyteller, and why the result lingers.

Queens of the Crone Age | Tracy Fahey | PS Publishing

Somewhere under the Beara peninsula a giant stone woman feels her own heart kick back into rhythm, and that ba-dum, ba-dum is the engine the whole book runs on.

She is the Cailleach. The Hag. An Cailleach Bhéarra, the one who tumbled islands from her apron when the land was new, then wept on the edge of the Atlantic until her grief set hard and she turned to rock. Tracy Fahey wakes her. The old goddess peels back stone eyelids onto a land that has gone sick on her watch. Smoke in the air, fish strangled in nets. So she does the one thing a god of stories can still do. She listens. A run of tales unspools out of that listening, and the waking frame closes around them like a hand around a fistful of loose beads.

I went in expecting a collection. I came out feeling like I had read one long incantation.

What it feels like to read

This is quiet horror, mostly. Fahey is not interested in making you jump. She is interested in the cold spot that opens at the back of your neck when you realise a thing you thought was dead has only been waiting, and waiting patiently, and waiting close.

The dread here builds the way weather builds. You get a clear morning, a bit of warmth, a kind old woman by a forest path who happens to know more than she should. Then the light shifts. Reading these stories feels like turning over wet stones on a shore; each one lifts to show something pale and alive underneath, quick to slide back out of the daylight. By the time you understand what you are looking at, the tide is already at your ankles.

Pacing is the sly part. Each story stands on its own, with its own woman at its centre, its own small geography of kitchen and cliff and care home. Underneath them runs the slow tidal pull of the Cailleach’s wake, and the closer you get to the end, the harder that current tugs. The frame keeps surfacing between the tales, the old woman stirring, the ground trembling, her old names rising around her like a chorus. It works on you. You start to feel the heartbeat under the floor.

And the range of fear is wide. There is the social horror of being shut away, a woman banished to an island, walled in by sea on all sides. There is the bodily horror of a mind coming loose from itself, a woman who wakes beside a husband whose name she cannot hold, fielding texts from an “Adam (work)” she has never met. There is folk terror proper, stone circles, a Sheela carving with a girl’s own name, drowned women who refuse to stay drowned. Different keys, same low note sounding under all of them.

Fahey writes in close first person almost throughout, and she switches the “I” from story to story like a woman trying on coats. One chapter you are an artist sketching haunted wrecks, talking in your head to a Lorna who is no longer there. The next you are a care worker watching the words THE END float across a first date. The voice changes register every time, yet the hand behind it stays steady, so the book feels both various and whole.

Her sentences are short when fear is near. She lets a fragment land hard. “Memory loss. I’m at a loss.” Then she opens the throttle and runs a long, looping line that mimics the way memory itself unrolls, soft and sideways, before snapping you back with three blunt words. That rhythm does a lot of the scaring. You relax into the music, and the music drops you.

She is precise about place, too. A jeep pushing into a Finnish whiteout. The smell of roast beef and the roll of Irish vowels around a name a non-speaker cannot quite catch, Máire Ní Mhurchú, said wrong and then said right. The “ba-dum, ba-dum” of the waking goddess. Small concrete things, set down plainly, so that when the uncanny arrives it has solid ground to stand on.

What I keep coming back to is restraint. Fahey trusts the gap. She gives you the kind old woman, the carving, the path through the trees, and she lets your own head do the rest of the work, which is always where the real chill lives.

Strip the folklore away and this is a book about getting older as a woman, and about refusing to apologise for it.

The Cailleach is the hinge. In the old tradition, she is the hag of winter, the shaper of the land, a sovereignty figure who turns to stone and sleeps under the country she made. Fahey takes that figure and reads her forwards, into now. The crone here is not a warning about decline. She is a reservoir of power that the modern world has tried to drain, dam, and forget. Age is not what diminishes these women. It is the thing that finally lets them stop performing.

Underneath that sits a second argument, about who gets remembered. The book is thick with women the record tried to erase, the committed, the drowned, the written-off, the wise woman whose file comes back blank from the shredder. Fahey lines them up and names them, the real and the mythic side by side, Biddy Early the Clare healer, saintly Bridget, midwives, Green Ladies, Sheela-na-gigs. The act of naming is the act of resistance. Remember her, and she is not gone.

There is an ecological thread woven through it as well, and it never feels bolted on. The Cailleach is the landscape. When she sickens, the land sickens; smoke, dead grass, the curdled stink of a poisoned coast. Heal the woman and you heal the ground, because in this cosmology they were never two separate things. It is an old idea given fresh and urgent teeth, that our forgetting of the old women and our wrecking of the old places might be the very same wound.

This is the territory Sharon Blackie has mapped in non-fiction, the reclaiming of the crone, of Hagitude, of the second half of a woman’s life as a source of authority rather than embarrassment. Fahey does it in fiction, and fiction lets her keep the fear in, which is the honest move. Power that has been buried for millennia does not come back gentle.

I have followed Tracy Fahey from day one, and this one feels like a gathering-in.

Her debut, The Unheimlich Manoeuvre, went after the uncanny in the domestic, and earned a British Fantasy Award nod for it. New Music for Old Rituals turned fully toward Irish folk horror, old tales rehoused in the present, inheritance as a kind of curse you cannot refuse. Then I Spit Myself Out put the female body under the lights, puberty to menopause rendered as terrain for terror, and it picked up the Rubery International Book Award. Her 2023 novella They Shut Me Up carried the feminist-folklore engine into longer form.

You can see all of it feeding into this book. The domestic unease of the early work, the folk material of the second, the bodily candour of the third, the long-breath confidence of the novella. What changes here is the scope. The earlier collections were arrangements of separate dark rooms. This one builds a whole house and puts a sleeping goddess in the foundations. The last story, “What Happens At The End,” already won her the Paul Cave Prize for Literature on its own, and folding it into the wake gives it a second life inside a larger design. This is a writer who has stopped collecting stories and started composing with them.

The folk horror revival has been running hot for a while now, and a lot of it looks backward, all pagan menace and men in fields doing something terrible at harvest. Fahey is working a different seam. Her horror grows out of folklore the way Lucie McKnight Hardy’s Water Shall Refuse Them does, out of belief that never actually left. It shares Andrew Michael Hurley‘s gift in Starve Acre too, the way the old dread seeps up through ordinary modern life. Readers who go to Daisy Johnson for slippery, water-logged female interiors will find a kindred current here.

But the corner Fahey is staking out is specifically the older woman’s. Most horror still files the crone under monster, the witch in the woods, the thing to be burned. Fahey takes that figure and hands her the microphone. She does not subvert the folk horror crone so much as redeem her, turn her from the scare into the one telling the story.

That feels like where the genre is heading, away from the wronged maiden and toward the unkillable old woman who outlasts everyone who tried to bury her. As a mosaic, with its single mythic frame stitching standalone tales into one body, it belongs on the shelf with the strongest of the modern folk-horror collections, and it earns the room.

The book closes on the Cailleach lifting a hand and saying, “It is time to begin again.” I believed her. After a wake this generous and this unafraid, beginning again feels less like an ending and more like a threat the old world deserves to hear.

Queens of the Crone Age by Tracy Fahey

A COLLECTION  by Tracy Fahey
CATEGORY  Folklore / Fantasy
PUBLICATION DATE  June 2026
COVER & INTERIOR ART  Jacob Stack
PAGES 287
ISBN  978-1-80394-580-4

EDITION
Trade Paperback 

ABOUT THE BOOK

The mythic Hag of Béara reawakens to find older women now ignored and marginalised. Devotional talismans left at her altar unlock fourteen stories:

• a young doctor inherits a strange and troubling patient (‘What Happens At The End,’ winner of the Paul Cave Prize for Literature 2024)
• a pregnant woman becomes enmeshed in a fertility cult (‘Witchwalking,’ on US editor Ellen Datlow’s Recommended Reading List for 2024)
• a domestic abuse survivor finds refuge in water (‘The Women In The Water,’ shortlisted for the London Independent Story Prize 2024).

The Hag listens to these stories, and as she does, her own wounds reopen. Can the narrators – and the Hag herself – find liberation and healing?Ideal for fans of Sharon Blackie’s Hagitude, Kirsty Logan’s A Portable Shelter and Daisy Johnson’s A Retelling.