Behind the Story: ‘Hagstone’ by Chloe Turner

Chloe Turner discusses the inspiration behind the story ‘Hagstone’ from her short story collection, Witches Sail in Eggshells. You can read the story in full here and the buy the collection here.

‘Hagstone’ is the first story in the collection. It’s about a necklace of ‘hagstones’ (stones, usually flints, with a naturally occurring hole), which ends up in the hands of a frustrated teenage girl and seems to grant her heady powers.

There’s definitely something a bit special about hagstones. I was an enthusiastic amateur geologist as a child—so much so my mother eventually had to remove the ‘rockery’ under my bed in case the joists gave way! Even though logically I know that the simple weathering action of the sea gives rise to their holes, there is still a mystical allure to finding these curiosities on a beach or riverside. And I’m clearly not alone in this—hagstones have a long history in folk magic, particularly in the Celtic nations, with the powers attributed to them including protection from witchcraft, evil charms, and snakebite (they are also known as adder stones, and in some cultures considered to be serpent eggs), and acting as a lens through which to view the fairy/other world or a portal to access it. Superstitious fishermen on the south coast of England have traditionally hung them from their bows on knotted wires to protect their craft at sea.

I suppose with this story I had in mind a modern-day fairy tale. So many fairy tales concern greed and retribution; I was thinking of the likes of The Fisherman’s Wife—here’s Grimm’s version—in which a woman, via her fisherman husband, is granted her every wish by an enchanted fish, but she becomes overwhelmed with greed and can’t find satisfaction no matter what she asks for. Ultimately, of course, she gets her comeuppance and is returned to the humble circumstances in which she started.

In my version, I wanted my protagonist to relish the sudden new power she is granted, to be greedy for more, but for there to be a vulnerability too. Leda is a young woman on the cusp of adulthood, such a potent but unsettling time. She’s feeling the loss of her dead father, the absence of her older sister, and she’s clashing with her grieving and unstable mother. Hagstones are something she collected on childhood holidays, and their tactile form carries strong memories from happier times, but the strange stone her sister left behind when she left for college abroad has something different about it, something unknown, a new allure.

Being the age she is, Leda is immediately receptive to the new opportunities the stone opens up for her, to the rush of her sudden attractiveness to the opposite sex, and the first sexual experiences that result. But that first heady taste of control is addictive, and it’s not long before she unconsciously directs the stone’s power towards those who have wronged her. When the situation spirals and regret creeps in, she lacks the maturity to moderate her actions. When someone dies, she realises things have gone too far, but the question is whether by then she can resist the power of the stone.

‘Hagstone’ won the 2017 Fresher Writing Prize in the short story category (judged by Picador’s Associate Publisher, Francesca Main) and was first published in the associated anthology, Fresher Writing Volume 3. You can read the story here.