Clara’s Verdict
Seven minutes. That is the whole of it. I pressed play on A Tale of Faerie one evening after bath time, the house finally quiet, and before I had quite settled properly into the armchair it was over. Dina Gregory’s Devonshire story, read by Holli Dempsey and released as an Audible Original in May 2020, is a genuine short story in audio form: not an extract, not a teaser for something longer, but a complete thing with a beginning, a middle, and an end that earns its quietness. That is rarer than it sounds on a platform built around the long listen.
It is also, within its seven minutes, quite lovely. Gregory writes the kind of rural English uncanny that trusts the strangeness of the setting to do most of the work, and the result is a small, well-made thing of the sort that the audio format, with its capacity for intimacy and its resistance to distraction, is particularly well suited to carry.
About the Audiobook
Jasmine has moved to an old cottage in the Devon countryside and nothing is going right. She itches at night. Small things disappear from where she left them and reappear in places she did not put them. The logic of her new life does not quite hold together in the way she expected when she made the move. When she finally has an encounter with a famous neighbour, things begin, gently and rather mysteriously, to improve.
Gregory does not explain the faerie. That is the right call, and it requires a degree of writerly confidence that shorter fiction sometimes lacks. The story belongs to a tradition of British rural folklore in which the uncanny is most effective when treated as simply part of the furniture of a particular place: unremarkable to those who have always known it, confusing and slightly unsettling to those who have arrived from somewhere else. Jasmine’s gradual orientation within that logic, the slow recognition that the rules of her new home are different from the rules she brought with her, is the story, and Gregory trusts it to carry the weight without elaboration or explanation.
The Devonshire setting is present without being laboured. There is a specific quality to the rural south-west of England in this kind of story, something about the weight of the old ways that the landscape carries without quite making visible, that Gregory captures in small atmospheric details rather than explicit description. The writing is economical, and economy at this length is a virtue rather than a limitation: every sentence does something, and none of them are wasted.
It is worth noting that this story is technically available for free through the Audible Stories Skill via Alexa. Simply asking Alexa for a bedtime story or a nighttime story may route you to it without a separate purchase. For those without an Alexa device, the Audible platform listing is the primary access route.
The Narration
Holli Dempsey is an excellent fit for this material. She has a warm, understated quality to her voice that never overplays the whimsy, which is precisely the risk with folk-inflected material of this kind. The story works because the supernatural elements are presented with the same matter-of-fact register as the mundane ones: the itching and the misplaced objects receive the same tone as the famous neighbour and the resolution. Dempsey maintains that consistency across seven minutes with the ease of a performer who has understood what the text needs rather than simply what it is about. Production quality, from Audible Originals, is warm and clean.
What Readers Say
No listener reviews are available on Audible UK. For a seven-minute story that has been available since 2020, that absence is unremarkable rather than damning. The Audible Originals short fiction catalogue is consistently under-reviewed relative to the quality it contains, partly because listeners encounter it by chance and partly because the experience of a very short story does not naturally prompt the same reviewing impulse as a twelve-hour novel. This particular story may reach you via an Alexa bedtime request rather than a deliberate search, which is not the kind of experience that leads to a review the following morning.
Who Should Listen?
A story for children old enough to follow a mild mystery and young enough to be satisfied by one that resolves gently rather than dramatically. Also, honestly, for adults who remember being that age and have seven minutes before bed. Families in Devon, or anyone with an affection for the rural English uncanny and its particular way of treating the inexplicable as simply the local custom, will find it especially well suited to them. It is also a genuine demonstration of what the short audio fiction form can do at its best: a complete world, a complete mood, and a complete story, in seven minutes with nothing wasted and nothing missing.
