Through the window, I could see snowdrops around the pond and a furtive cat, white against white snow.īeauty and ugliness nestle together, as exemplified in the queer club scenes in ‘Hags’, ‘The Bequest’ and ‘Stay A While’. She had found an envelope and was tearing into it with the letter knife. The narrator of ‘Ingratitude’ pauses to ponder an uncanny apparition: The slab had absorbed none of the day’s heat, and Livia was already tensing her body as she undressed to lie upon it. In ‘Stay A While’, haunting life is breathed into stone:Ī raised marble slab lay at the centre of the folly, with tufts of moss growing from its veins.

An insect with legs ‘as fine as hairs’ wonders through ‘Unfinished and Unformed’. This is counterbalanced by Craig’s astonishing lightness in describing beauty. Or the twisted and hideous jealousy that drives an academic to attempted murder. Sometimes she describes things so visceral that the reader almost feels physically sick, like when she vividly narrates eating a human corpse, at once 'sweet and bitter'. This is apparent in her fluctuating use of language. Her reader never feels too full of one poison or too far from its antidote. The most rewarding aspect of Craig’s prose is its duality. Though the stories nod to religious and gothic traditions, they feel electrically modern non-rigid gender identity, queer sex and sexuality add a fluidity that allow her characters to dance in every direction. There are vampires in the clubs and the Devil is on acid.

Often, these folkloric elements are woven into a fabric of modern day debauchery - drugs, parties and sex. Craig’s stories have an otherworldly sense of the supernatural: she writes of strange creatures, magical outsiders and uncanny happenings. This is the paradoxic at the heart of Leon Craig’s debut short story collection, Parallel Hells.

Livia orchestrates a Satanic mass to distract herself from a recently remembered trauma and two lovers must resolve their differences in order to defy a lethal curse.Within beauty, there is horror. An Oxford historian, in bitter competition with the rest of her faculty members, discovers an ancient tome whose sinister contents might solve her problems. 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.Īsta is an ancient being who feasts on the shame of contemporary Londoners, who now, beyond anything, wishes only to fit in with a group of friends they will long outlive. Some say that hell is other people and some say hell is loneliness. , In 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.

Leon craig parallel hells