A short, sharp shock: short story collections

Cursed Bunny by Bora Chung, translated by Anton Hur (Honford Star)

Cursed Bunny is a genre-defying collection of short stories by Korean author Bora Chung. Blurring the lines between magical realism, horror, and science-fiction, Chung uses elements of the fantastic and surreal to address the very real horrors and cruelties of patriarchy and capitalism in modern society.

Anton Hur’s translation skilfully captures the way Chung’s prose effortlessly glides from being terrifying to wryly humorous.

Eyes Guts Throat Bones by Moïra Fowley-Doyle (Weidenfeld & Nicolson)

The belly groan of a face unpeeled. A break-up poem recited knee-deep in bog water. An ancient burial mound rising and falling like a chest. The ghost of Stephen Gately reading the ingredients on a ham and cheese sandwich.

Startling, sinister and irresistible, Moïra Fowley’s award-winning debut collection about queer, female bodies at the end of the world unravels all of our darkest impulses and deepest fears.

Things We Say in the Dark by Kirsty Logan (Harvill Secker)

Some things can’t be spoken about in the light of day. But we can visit our fears at night, in the dark. We can turn them over and weigh them in our hands and maybe that will protect us from them. But maybe not.

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. From a talented writer who has been compared to Angela Carter, Things We Say in the Dark is a powerful contemporary collection of feminist stories, ranging from vicious fairy tales to disturbing horror and tender ghost stories.

We were delighted to host Kirsty on The Writing Life podcast last year. Listen here →

Eerie East Anglia: Fearful Tales of Field and Fen, edited by Edward Parnell (British Library Publishing)

Welcome to East Anglia, one of the heartlands of Britishstrange and ghostly fiction whose mind-stretching expanses, wide, yawning skies and disorientating tidal fens have bewitched generations of writers.

Unearthing seventeen short tales set in Norfolk, Essex, Suffolk and Cambridgeshire from the 1900s to the 2010s, Edward Parnell’s selection unites eternal classics by M. R. James, Robert Aickman and Marjorie Bowen with modern chillers from Daisy Johnson and Matthew Holness to offer a sweeping view across the dark horizons of East Anglia’s eeriest literature.

Event: Join Edward Parnell at Waterstones Norwich this November to hear more about these spine-chilling stories. Book here →

Contemporary gothic: atmospheric fiction

Our Wives Under the Sea by Julia Armfield (Picador)

Miri thinks she has got her wife back, when Leah finally returns after a deep-sea mission that ended in catastrophe. It soon becomes clear, though, that Leah is not the same. Whatever happened in that vessel, whatever it was they were supposed to be studying before they were stranded on the ocean floor, Leah has brought part of it back with her, onto dry land and into their home.

Our Wives Under The Sea is the debut novel from Julia Armfield, the critically acclaimed author of Salt Slow. It’s a story of falling in love, loss, grief, and what life there is in the deep deep sea.

Event: Julia Armfield will be visiting UEA to discuss her stunning, unsettling new novel, Private Rites, in November. Book here →

Luckenbooth by Jenni Fagan (William Heinemann)

The devil’s daughter rows to the shores of Leith in a coffin. The year is 1910 and she has been sent to a tenement building in Edinburgh by her recently deceased father to bear a child for a wealthy man and his fiancée. The harrowing events that follow lead to a curse on the building and its residents – a curse that will last for the rest of the century.

Luckenbooth is a bold, haunting and dazzlingly unique novel about the stories and secrets we leave behind, and the places that hold them long after we are gone.

Orpheus Builds a Girl by Heather Parry (Gallic Books)

Wilhelm von Tore is dying. As he looks back on his life he reflects on his upbringing in Dresden, his beloved grandmother and his medical career during the second world war. But mostly he remembers his darling Luci, the great love of his life, his dark-haired beauty promised to him in a dream years before they met.

But through the cracks in Wilhem’s story there is another voice, that of Gabriela, and she will not let this version of events go unchallenged. She tells the story of her sister Luciana, fearless and full of life, and the madman who robbed her from her grave.

Based on a chilling true story, Orpheus Builds a Girl is the debut novel from award-winning author Heather Parry.

Listen to Heather Parry discuss writing the grotesque body on The Writing Life podcast →

Melmoth by Sarah Perry (Serpent’s Tail)

Everyone that Melmoth seeks out must make a choice: to live with what they’ve done, or be led into the darkness.

After the success of her tour-de-force novel, The Essex Serpent, Sarah Perry returns with Melmoth, a profound, ambitiously realised work of fiction which asks fundamental questions about guilt, forgiveness, moral reckoning and how we come to terms with our actions in a conflicted world.

The Little Stranger by Sarah Waters (Virago)

In a dusty post-war summer in rural Warwickshire, a doctor is called to a patient at lonely Hundreds Hall.

Home to the Ayres family for over two centuries, the Georgian house, once grand and handsome, is now in decline, its masonry crumbling, its gardens choked with weeds, its owners – mother, son and daughter – struggling to keep pace.

But are the Ayreses haunted by something more sinister than a dying way of life? Little does Dr Faraday know how closely, and how terrifyingly, their story is about to become entwined with his.

Chilling truths: non-fiction reads

Feeding the Monster: Why Horror Has a Hold on Us by Anna Bogutskaya (Faber & Faber)

Zombies want brains. Vampires want blood. Cannibals want human flesh. All monsters need feeding.

Horror has been embraced by mainstream pop culture more than ever before, with horror characters and aesthetics infecting TV, music videos and even TikTok trends. Yet even with the commercial and critical success of countless horror films and TV series over the last few years, loving the genre still prompts the question: what’s wrong with you? Implying, of course, that there is something not quite right about the people who make and consume it. In Feeding the Monster, Anna Bogutskaya dispels this notion once and for all by examining how horror responds to and fuels our feelings of fear, anxiety, pain, hunger and power.

Ghostland: In Search of a Haunted Country by Edward Parnell (William Collins)

In his late thirties, Edward Parnell found himself trapped in the recurring nightmare of a family tragedy. For comfort, he turned to his bookshelves, back to the ghost stories that obsessed him as a boy, and to the writers through the ages who have attempted to confront what comes after death.

Ghostland is Parnell’s moving exploration of what has haunted our writers and artists – and what is haunting him. It is a unique and elegiac meditation on grief, memory and longing, and of the redemptive power of stories and nature.

Course: Interested in writing your own non-fiction book? We dare you to have a look at our beginners’ online tutored course, led by Edward Parnell. Book here →

It Came from the Closet: Queer Reflections on Horror edited by Joe Vallese (The Feminist Press at CUNY)

Through the lens of horror—from Halloween to Hereditary—queer and trans writers consider the films that deepened, amplified, and illuminated their own experiences.

It Came from the Closet features twenty-five essays by writers speaking to this relationship, through connections both empowering and oppressive.

Strange places & uncanny geography

The Black Dreams: Strange Stories from Northern Ireland edited by Reggie Chamberlain-King (Blackstaff Press)

Bringing together some of Northern Ireland’s finest writers, along with some of the best new talents, The Black Dreams celebrates and extends the rich tradition of the weird, surreal and dream-like in Northern Irish writing.

The 14 stories gathered here criss-cross coast, border and city as they map a ‘strange’ territory of in-between states and unstable realities in which understanding is unreliable. It is also a powerful act of imagining and storytelling – a vibrant, vivid and exhilarating exploration of a world we cannot, or choose not, to see.

You Should Have Left by Daniel Kehlmann, translated by Ross Benjamin (Pantheon Books)

On retreat in the wintry Alps with his family, a writer is optimistic about completing the sequel to his breakthrough film. Nothing to disturb him except the wind whispering around their glassy house. The perfect place to focus, until guilt and expectation strain at his concentration, and strain, too, at the walls of the house. Then the words start to appear in his notebook; the words he didn’t write.

Familiar and forbidding by turns, this is an electrifying experiment in form by one of Europe’s boldest writers. The ordinary struggles of a marriage transform, in Kehlmann’s hands, into a twisted fable that stays darkly in the mind.

Water Shall Refuse Them by Lucie McKnight Hardy (Dead Ink)

The heatwave of 1976. Following the accidental drowning of her sister, sixteen-year-old Nif and her family move to a small village on the Welsh borders to escape their grief. But rural seclusion doesnt bring any relief. As her family unravels, Nif begins to put together her own form of witchcraft collecting talismans from the sun-starved land. That is, until she meets Mally, a teen boy who takes a keen interest in her, and has his own secret rites to divulge.

Reminiscent of the suspense of Shirley Jackson and soaked in the folkhorror of English heritage, Water Shall Refuse Them is an atmospheric coming-of-age novel and a thrilling debut.

It’s not scary, but…it kind of is?

The Discomfort of Evening by Marieke Lucas Rijneveld, translated by Michele Hutchison (Faber & Faber)

Ten-year-old Jas has a unique way of experiencing her universe: the feeling of udder ointment on her skin as protection against harsh winters; the texture of green warts, like capers, on migrating toads; the sound of ‘blush words’ that aren’t in the Bible. But when a tragic accident ruptures the family, her curiosity warps into a vortex of increasingly disturbing fantasies – unlocking a darkness that threatens to derail them all.

A bestselling sensation in the Netherlands, Marieke Lucas Rijneveld’s radical debut novel is studded with images of wild, violent beauty: a world of language unlike any other, exquisitely captured in Michele Hutchison’s translation.

Ghost Wall by Sarah Moss (Granta)

A suspenseful and chilling novel of haunted landscapes and a teenage girl in danger…

Seventeen-year-old Silvie is camping in rural Northumberland with her father and a group of archaeologists, who are attempting to uncover evidence of human sacrifice. As Silvie glimpses the possibility of freedom with the students – new female friendships and a sexual awakening – her difficult relationship with her overbearing father begins to deteriorate. As the feelings of dread build the haunting rites of the past begin to bleed into the present…

Night Theatre by Vikram Paralkar (Serpent’s Tail)

As dusk approaches, a former surgeon finds himself faced with a preposterous task: to mend the wounds of the dead family before sunrise so that they may return to life.

At once dustily realist and magically unreal, Night Theatre is a powerful fable about the miracles we ask of doctors, and the fine line they negotiate between life and death.

Penance by Eliza Clark (Faber & Faber)

It’s been nearly a decade since the horrifying murder of sixteen-year-old Joan Wilson rocked the small seaside town of Crow-on-Sea. Based on hours of interviews with witnesses and family members, and even correspondence with the killers themselves, journalist Alec Z. Carelli has constructed what he claims is the ‘definitive account’ of the crime. It’s a riveting snapshot of lives scarred by tragedy, and a town left in turmoil.

The only question is: how much of Carelli’s story is true?

The Many by Wyl Menmuir (Salt Publishing)

‘Four boats work out of the cove now… Four where there were fourteen. And the remains of the others corrode slowly, long since stripped of tackle and anything useful and waiting to be dislodged one by one in the winter storms and reclaimed by the sea.’

Permeated with an unnerving and palatable aura of claustrophobia, The Many offers a vivid picture of an isolated community, threatened by extinction and clinging desperately to a way of life being steadily eroded.