Move over Midsomer – Weeping Bank is the new village twinned with disaster

Tales from Weeping Bank, Stoke Library, Coventry, 2 July 2025.

Review by Amanda Burden.

We are all familiar with Midsomer, ITV’s rural region twinned with death, where the Grim Reaper lurks behind every garden hedge and undertakers can retire on the back of their earnings at the age of 30. But how many of us have heard of Weeping Bank, the phantomtastic answer to Midsomer county?

Well, everyone who visited Stoke Library on Tuesday evening, 2 July, where Weeping Bank’s ‘Librarian’ A G Smith regaled visitors with two of his terrifying tales from the fictitious rural idyll. The village of Weeping Bank is the creation of Smith, used as the setting for a series of ghost stories in the best M R James tradition.

Fictitious it may be, but its geography and residents are painstakingly recreated in minute detail by the writer/ performer. The Weeping Library Gazette, a brochure/ programme accompanying the reading, provides a history and map, with meticulous illustrations of the foreboding Rokeham Woods, the ominous Merrington Pier and Pavilion, and the sinister Van Jarrett Antiques Dealership.

The latter is the setting for one of the tales, featuring an unscrupulous banker and a cursed amethyst brooch… we know how this ends. Smith shows he is not only a skilled  author but an accomplished actor, transforming into an archaic shopkeeper in the vein of Hammer House of Horror’s Peter Cushing.

Horror tropes are never far from either of his stories, with a tangled-haired ghost child crawling inexorably across the floorboards conjuring up images of cult film The Ring, and a menacing female figure with outstretched pointed finger straight from the pages of Susan Hill’s The Woman in Black.

That said, tropes gain their status for a reason – they may not be unexpected, but they are enjoyable, effective and pack a hefty dramatic punch. The fact that Smith can bring the images to life just with words is testimony to his vivid turn of phrase, which sparkles as brightly as the amethyst stone in the story. Fellow player Rob Whitehouse (Maris Reever) set the scene perfectly as he introduced the librarian and welcomed us to Weeping Bank.

It was no mean feat to set the scene of a cobwebbed library after hours on a sweltering summer’s night, but Smith and Whitehouse pulled it off with the help of flickering candles, blacked out windows and a whistling wind soundtrack.  Tales from Weeping Bank is currently touring the country and I for one eagerly await The Librarian’s return. Overall, good creepy fun to send shivers down the spine, even on a scorching July evening.

See what else is coming to Stoke Library: https://www.coventry.gov.uk/directory-record/50155/stoke-library