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Parallel Hells

Parallel Hells

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Price: £7.495
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Drugs and pornography are pillows which the characters used to cushion themselves from the outside world. Thank you to Sceptre for sending me a proof copy to review, I can’t wait to discuss this one with my other horror book fans! When Stan, who is white, confronts Gary, who is black, the encounter bristles with accusations of racism. Tommy talks about the fear of getting stuck and jamming “like a piece of wood you stick in a wall or something.

For all their Grand Guignol effects, these are stories worth revisiting for their honesty about love and loss. Whilst a party next door throbs through the walls, she drifts through her house with a ghostly lack of purpose.It is such a fresh and playful approach to storytelling that you cannot help but be totally enamoured with Craig’s abilities. She squeezes into the dark space, pursuing a dot of light on the other side of the wall, beyond which, the neighbour’s party thrives. Most of the endings were very open and vague and I feel like I would've enjoyed that more if some others had more clear cut endings. In one segment, “The Camera,” the friendship between Stan and Gary, both in their 20s, is strained when Gary begins taking photos of Stan without him knowing.

Demons carouse in the decadent London party scene, metaphysical books provide a leg-up in the cut-throat but precarious world of Oxford academia, trauma meets a black mass, and gender identity and transphobia are explored through folk magic. It is a sentiment that Craig, Ridgeway, and all bibliophiles share: the pleasure of being able to vividly feed off other people’s dramatics, like a demon, but then close the book without consequence once we’ve got our fill. Her writing has been published by the White Review, the TLS, Another Gaze and the London Magazine, among others. Overall, the longer of the stories worked the best, allowing Craig to get into their stride and flesh out characters to their fullest potential, without losing the tension and the mystery of the unseen crucial to a great gothic tale. The first story in the collection 'Unfinished and Unformed' promised much and left me excited to read the rest.There are a lot of turns of phrase that I lingered on because they were either quite romantic or just particularly lovely to read. 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. 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. 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 revelers and a notorious murderer who discovers her Viking husband is not what he seems.

The very short stories sometimes left the reader slightly too much in the dark, with only a few scraps of certainty left to try and piece together what happened before the end. Both the mood and the content were very up my street, the writing style was not my favourite but still enjoyable. Parallel Hells will not disappoint any connoisseur of the gothic in its most fulsome and unapologetic sense. These are people who don’t own their own homes and some – in the case of one compulsive liar – don’t own their own stories.

Through those concepts, Leon Craig explores identity and queerness as she modernizes the familiar tropes — the satanic ritual is suggested by a character in response to trauma; a father who sacrificed to have a child can’t accept that his son is actually his daughter; the shame-sucking demon is trying to figure out whether or not to be honest about their true self with friends; a haunted book is used to help a student get ahead in their über-competitive doctoral program at Oxford. 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. I really enjoyed the level of detail that Leon Craig puts into setting up the story, even when we are thrown into the narrative. While Craig has filled this book with recognizable horror elements, she seems to be telling us that the most spine-chilling thing is the everyday human experience. This one tells two stories side by side, literally in two columns with the page split in half down the middle, with page breaks level with one another.

In his seventh book, A Shock, Keith Ridgway is like a croupier, shuffling together southeast London lives and doling them out to the reader. In some way in a lot of these stories there's this element of characters thinking they're in control, when they're absolutely not, and they're totally in denial and there's a refusal to accept powerlessness or lack of authority. It was a brilliant take on friendship and connection, found family, shame, and secrecy, all themes familiar to queer stories but twisted into a surprisingly tender demonic little package. I n this deliciously strange debut collection, Leon Craig draws on folklore and gothic horror in refreshingly inventive ways to explore queer identity, love, power and the complicated nature of being human.She holds her breath and tries to squeeze further along, her left arm outstretched towards the light, such as it is, a glow from the kitchen”. 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. Favorite stories from this collection included: “A Wolf in the Temple,” “Lipless Grin,” “Hags,” “No Dominion,” and “Saplings. The little details make the stories more encompassing and really add to the eerie theme of the collection. Parallel Hells is a testament to hard work and perseverance: a collection of short stories that are delectable and dark.



  • Fruugo ID: 258392218-563234582
  • EAN: 764486781913
  • Sold by: Fruugo

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