Parallel Hells

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The author uses unfinished 'endings' too often where the reader sits and goes "Wtf was that supposed to mean? Part-way through the narrative of this story, the page splits and we are presented with two characters’ perspectives running parallel down the page. However, the demon is clear on what makes earth such a bountiful feeding ground “… the complicated rules humans had invented for one another.

Alongside his work at Insider, he is also studying for his MA in Literature and the Arts at the University of Oxford. The agonies of breaking up with a lover, and of feeling oneself adrift in one's late twenties, are subtly captured in several of the longer pieces. Leon Craig has reinvigorated the Gothic genre, investing it with a witty and iconoclastic contemporary sensibility.The 103 third parties who use cookies on this service do so for their purposes of displaying and measuring personalized ads, generating audience insights, and developing and improving products. I'm really pleased I picked this up because one of my 2022 booktube resolutions was to read more horror.

I loved the two stories that really experimented with form: “raw pork and opium,” which features two narratives side-by-side across several pages; and “No Dominion,” which is told in an elliptical form.You can change your choices at any time by visiting Cookie preferences, as described in the Cookie notice. It is impossible not to sympathise with this violent, shame-sucking demon as it longs to tell its human friends who it really is: “I couldn’t burden them with this, could I? These are characters in the background of someone else’s story, who are later given the chance to be the main character in their own.

His frankness causes a sordid sensation to seethe the length of the reader – we feel no different to the faceless fourth person in the images, recording David at his most intimate. I found the best stories were the ones that were a little longer, because they gave Craig a chance to flex her impressive writing muscles and created more space for her examination of the human condition through these surreal vibes. Offering the reader multiple ways to experience the story tied in well with the content of the tale, so for me was an example of formal experimentation done absolutely right. There is something unnerving about its unavoidable familiarity, we, ourselves, have been captured when we least expect it. As a whole, this collection — which is full of sensuous, Gothic-inspired stories — takes familiar concepts in the horror genre (the vampire, the Golem, the haunted house, the cursed books, the demons, the possessions, the satanic rituals, the faeries) and breathes new life into them.Hiding in lofts and peeping through cracks in the wall, these are characters moving rodent-like through spaces which are not their own. It tells two stories side by side (quite literally, as there are two columns of text on the page) and both stories are different experiences of the same environment. But in the chapter titled “The Flat ,” we are thrust into the primary voyeuristic perspective, as though we are watching David, who has just moved into a new apartment, through a hole in the wall.

The first was that this book is an exploration of identity, especially maybe queer identity (queer horror is a whole vibe), told about people who are discovering things about themselves that they might not necessarily like, or ways in which they don't conform to molds that they think they should conform to. Favorite stories from this collection included: “A Wolf in the Temple,” “Lipless Grin,” “Hags,” “No Dominion,” and “Saplings. Patronised by London’s precariat, the conversations we witness here needle at entrenched social issues and pick at the political fabric of the city in the pre-election years.Loads of stuff and in the fantasy I've read outside of Terry Pratchett's discworld stuff you don't see them a heck of a lot. A glorious collection of short stories that reads as if Edgar Allan Poe and Shirley Jackson had a little queer baby. Even stories I found less enchanting were still a good read, and while I didn't connect as much with all of them none felt like filler, which is always a worry with any collection.