All of a sudden it's become Autumn - as it always seems to - and so my hibernatory instincts are quite naturally calling upon me to curl up on the sofa with a good storybook, preferably something completely escapist and regressive. Something even, that demands rain and rattling window panes!

It's been a while since I read any fantasy, and since recently reading the Lancashire Witches inspired 'Mist over Pendle', I've a yen for something with cunning folk and faeries and other queer folkloric entities.

Whilst browsing material on ballads with a supernatural theme, I happened upon a wee essay which discusses briefly some works of fiction, which draw upon magical ballads for their inspiration. Cut and Paste of a few excerpts from The Music of Faery here:

"Some years ago I traveled the Border Country along with fantasy author Jane Yolen, who has used ballad themes to great effect in several of her books. ("Tam Lin" in the picture book of the same name, "Kemp Owyn" in the picture book Dove Isabeau; "The Grey Selchie" in the collection Neptune Rising. In Sister Light, Sister Dark, Yolen creates her own ballads, which read nonetheless like songs handed down through many, many years.) [...] "Tam Lin" has captured the imagination of more fantasy authors and artists than any other single ballad, [...]
Patricia A. McKillip's novel Winter Rose is a gorgeous, poetic work of mythic fiction weaving "Tam Lin" and a second faery ballad, "Thomas the Rhymer," into a wintry romance set in a land reminiscent of medieval England. Pamela Dean's fine novel Tam Lin (Book #5 in the "Adult Fairy Tales" series) uses the ballad as the basis of a contemporary coming-of-age tale set among the theater students at a midwestern college campus. Elizabeth Marie Pope's retelling of the ballad, titled The Perilous Gard, is set in the courts of Elizabethan Scotland. The book is written for Young Adult readers, but is highly recommended for adults as well. Alan Garner's Red Shift is an unusual, subtle, powerful reworking of the ballad's themes. Dahlov Ipcar uses the ballad in her short novel A Dark Horn Blowing, while Joan Vinge retells it in short story form in "Tam Lin" (published in Imaginary Lands, edited by Robin McKinley). Diana Wynne Jones, like Patricia McKillip, combines the tale with "Thomas the Rhymer" in her novel Fire and Hemlock -- but this wonderful, highly original tale is set in modern England. [...]
Delia Sherman's excellent first novel, Through a Brazen Mirror, is also based on this evocative song. "I heard Martin Carthy's version of 'Famous Flower'," Delia told me, "and it haunted me with questions. [...]
I asked Delia if she had a theory about why certain writers found ballad material so compelling, returning to it again and again. "What I like best about ballads," she said, "is that they're plots with all the motivations left out. Why did Young Randall's stepmother want to poison him? Why choose eels? Why did Randall eat them (especially if they were green and yellow)? There's a novel there, or at least a short story."

And on it goes...

Just wondering what fantastical folkloric fictional Autumnal delights others would recommend - specifically ballad inspired or otherwise. And what they think in general of such modern literary borrowings from traditional magical ballads?