'These nine pieces hang together, in my mind, as an accompaniment to my poems'. So wrote Ted Hughes in the foreword to this collection, taken from forty years of occasional story-telling. Of the nine items, six are from Wodwo, Hughes's 1967 collection of poems and other writings, while 'The Head' has appeared only in a magazine, and 'The Deadfall' in an anthology of ghost stories. 'O'Kelly's Angel', written when the author had just left university, is published for the first time.