The Conjuror's Game:
A short fantasy based around the Celtic board-game, fidchell, the rules for which are lost. Fisher's first novel is slight, though pacey, and reminiscent of early Alan Garner.

The Candleman:
Another short work, this time using the Celtic notion of the "spirit of plsce", in the form of Hafren, Spirit of the Severn. (Hafren is the Welsh name for the Severn.) Hafren is as devious, capricious, deceptive and malicious as the waters of the Severn Estuary and she wants the land along her Welsh shore, reclaimed by humans, back. She will use the life of the Candleman, trapped by a curse in an ordinary candle, to get it. If the candle is ever burned completely away, the Candleman will die...and he's lost the stump of it that remains....

Many folk have used personifications of places and weather magic in their fantasy fiction, but I can't recall another one using the spirit of a river in quite such a central and dramatic way. For the area she describes, which is below sea level, flooding is a real risk when storm and tide combine and Fisher evokes that fear well, even amongst those who know nothing of the supernatural enemy they face.

Fintan's Tower:
The final short novel in this volume extrapolates ideas from Welsh Celtic myth and is very similar to the first in scope and tone. It is at its best in our world, not the Other one, which feels hardly real because it is so under-developed.

Overall:
Worthwhile for The Candleman, which shows the imagination, atmosphere and tension Fisher is capable of, but the bracketing pair are slight indeed. It appears that Fisher has developed greatly as a writer over the course of her twenty or so published novels.
( )

While I thought this extremely well written, I found that the plot lacked complexity or even real assets. I know you have to take into account the fact that it’s directed at a much younger readership and that these are short stories not novels but still… I found all three of them predictable, lacking credibility. Perhaps it would have been better if the three stories had actually taken place in the same world, rather than happening in three different ones. In the end, you have trouble defining what the author calls “the otherworldâ€?. ( )