Parallel Hells

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The agonies of breaking up with a lover, and of feeling oneself adrift in one's late twenties, are subtly captured in several of the longer pieces. But yeah- Leon's writing has the perfect sense to describe and flesh out the characters in just a few paragraphs. To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average.

A glorious collection of short stories that reads as if Edgar Allan Poe and Shirley Jackson had a little queer baby . Raw pork and opium has one of the more interesting styles of writing explored however the context of the story leaves you going. Karl and Peppi live in his mind as a “faceless fact,” a thin form of life that desperately needs fleshing out. Throughout these startling and original short stories, readers' expectations are regularly subverted - and amply rewarded.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. The 103 third parties who use cookies on this service do so for their purposes of displaying and measuring personalized ads, generating audience insights, and developing and improving products. Her academic work focuses on contemporary trauma literature and theory but her freelance and creative work covers any and all topics, particularly those which deal with the horrors of capitalism and issues of gender and class. Offering the reader multiple ways to experience the story tied in well with the content of the tale, so for me was an example of formal experimentation done absolutely right.

Each story deals, in some way, with what it means to move through the world at an angle to the perceived norm. 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. Stan believes “the photographs, and Gary’s silence, seemed to amount to something… they constituted a challenge. 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.The horror I like best isn’t necessarily gory or in your face but rather a subtle creeping sense of dread, or something being off. The short, twisted tales collected in Leon Craig's Parallel Hells have a laconic elegance that's both chilling and pleasurable . The stories are in a very short space of time able to give you this intense burst of emotional connection to characters that are either very human or very intentionally NOT, but allows you to empathise with them all the same.

But anyway, keep that in mind when looking at the rating, I'm definitely not the best judge of the genre. 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. We don’t share your credit card details with third-party sellers, and we don’t sell your information to others. 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. The little details make the stories more encompassing and really add to the eerie theme of the collection.A glorious collection of short stories that reads as if Edgar Allan Poe and Shirley Jackson had a little queer baby. All the stories contained within the pages of Parallel Hells were a huge hit for me, there wasn’t a story I disliked or felt bored by, and I felt greatly entertained while reading. I really enjoyed the level of detail that Leon Craig puts into setting up the story, even when we are thrown into the narrative. Both vibrantly contemporary and decadently gothic, the stories in Parallel Hells shimmer with queer power and wicked humour.