Parallel Hells

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There was a lot to like in all these stories (as I mentioned, Craig’s writing is a standout), but some of the stories’ meaning struck me as obtuse and made it hard for me to connect with them, and Craig never really gives a satisfying, full-stop ending to any tale (even the ones I liked), which, yes, adds to this hazy vibe but also left me a little frustrated when it kept happening.

It is such a fresh and playful approach to storytelling that you cannot help but be totally enamoured with Craig's abilities. By turns unsettling, funny and fiercely intelligent, Parallel Hells is a queer carnival of monsters and masks. In the thirteen darkly audacious stories of Parallel Hells we meet a golem, made of clay, learning that its powers far exceed its Creator’s expectations; a ruined mansion which grants the secret wishes of a group of revellers and a notorious murderer who discovers her Viking husband is not what he seems. Her writing has been published by the White Review, the TLS, Another Gaze and the London Magazine, among others. You have this story telling you about the demon's past, their relationship with their friends, their guilt over lying and presenting themselves as a human to people they've genuinely come to like, and then talks about shame as a negative emotion.Tommy talks about the fear of getting stuck and jamming “like a piece of wood you stick in a wall or something.

The last story, Saplings, was definitely my favourite, along with The Bequest, No Dominion, Hags and Lick the Dust. Irresistibly strange and inventive, Parallel Hells is a collection of dark and delightful stories that blends folklore and gothic horror with a contemporary twist. 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. The characters in the novel are eager to observe others, but refuse to see themselves, even when staring into mirrors. The horror in this collection is less overt than you might be expecting; these aren’t stories that will make you squeamish, they’re stories that will wake you up in the middle of the night.You can change your choices at any time by visiting Cookie preferences, as described in the Cookie notice. The narrative is a collection of stories that are clipped and staccato like the trimmed and pruned tweets we send pulsing into the ether every day. Through this blend of folklore and legend, repurposed to capture modern anxieties, the reader will come across cursed bracelets, severed hands, vampires and femme fatales. My favourite story was definitely the last one but I still just didn't connect as much as I wanted to. Both vibrantly contemporary and decadently gothic, the stories in Parallel Hells shimmer with queer power and wicked humour.

Her writing has been published by the White Review , the TLS , Another Gaze and the London Magazine , among others. His own unconscious prejudice, until this moment, was the previously faceless fact that he had never before been acknowledged. I loved some of the stories in this collection, I liked others, and I’m pretty sure I’m not smart enough to understand a few.By turns dark, sharp, witty and tender, I'm a huge fan of Leon Craig's writing, and the way she reveals the complex dance of beauty and brutality in our innermost, most vulnerable selves. This endeavour is echoed later in the prose when Tommy, disorientated in the throes of his abundant drug use, expounds to his Uber driver about cavers who “go down into the deep deep cave systems, tiny little tunnels barely the width of their bodies. It was what I had once loved about the past, the intimacy of studying other human beings and uncovering what had long remained secret, without any messy interaction. We watch David as he eventually discovers pornographic photos of the couple: “In the mirror there is a reflection of a fourth man, naked, with an erection, holding the phone that is taking the photos.

I was not the woman they believed me to be, indeed I was no woman at all, I was only like this because most humans needed me to pick one or the other. It's fantasy/light horror with a liberal sprinkling of trauma that makes some of the stories highly arresting, some of them sweet and some of them just very good fun. One thing that drew me to this book as soon as I picked it up was reading in the blurb that it had a story in about golems, which are one of my favourite mythological creatures. Is this a story in part about acting in other peoples' interests as YOU see them, and then making a choice not to do that?In 2006, he was a semi-finalist for BBC Radio Voice of Musical Theatre at the New Theatre in Cardiff. Leon Craig confidently navigates real places and imaginary spaces most of us shy away from and leaves us deliciously teased, unsettled and hungry for more. Hags” is one of those stories that lingers in the mind like a fragrance, packing very human anxieties into the silver scales of a supernatural consciousness.