The narrator of “The Only Thing I Can’t Tell You Is Why” believes her new baby is dead, even as he gurgles and burps.
Stories can be brief and impressionistic, leaving the reader with a nagging lack of closure in “Half Sick of Shadows”, apparently caring parents find an apt way to rid themselves of a small child, for reasons unknown. “Things My Wife and I Found Hidden in Our House” mixes the contemporary and folkloric as a couple unwittingly summon up a kelpie. But Big Pop’s secret isn’t just green fingers. A young woman returns to the house of her dead father: “Big Pop, terror of the town, half the teeth smacked out of his head.” The building is surrounded by the sunflowers only Big Pop could get to grow so far north, “their heavy heads like hoods on drooping necks, their leaves twitching like hands”. In “My House Is Out Where the Lights End”, one of the more straightforward chillers, nature exudes a patriarchal menace. But she stopped me before the end of the first story.” Her wife is not a fan of the project: “she doesn’t like horror. In between the stories are what purport to be authorial notes the book is being composed in Iceland at a writing retreat where, we are told, “I decided I was ready to write about my fears.” Quickly, though, this construct is revealed as yet another fiction, with the “author” confessing to her own creeping terrors and sense of alienation.
All will burrow their way into your brain and not let go' Stylist These dark tales explore women's fears with electrifying honesty and invention and speak to one another about female bodies, domestic claustrophobia, desire and violence. Couples wrestle with a lack of connection to their children a schoolgirl becomes obsessed with the female anatomical models in a museum and a cheery account of child's day out is undercut by chilling footnotes.
You won't put it down' Sunday TelegraphĪ shocking collection of dark stories, ranging from chilling contemporary fairytales to disturbing supernatural fiction.Īlone in a remote house in Iceland a woman is unnerved by her isolation another can only find respite from the clinging ghost that follows her by submerging herself in an overgrown pool.
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