For fifty years, she has trained to slay wyrms - but none have appeared since the Nameless One, and the younger generation.

Terrifying tales: Jay unearths a family secret at her

Haven’t read a horror short story collection before but thought these stories had interesting var Despite the collection’s wide-reaching themes, the stories are always deeply grounded in relationships, whether romantic, familial, or within a community.

We know there are thousands of National readers who want to debate, argue and go back and forth in the comments section of our stories. In this short story from her collection Things We Say in the Dark, titled ‘My House is Out Where the Lights End’, author Kirsty Logan ponders: Is there anything scarier than the idea that even those closest to us are unknowable?

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Everything was silent and still, and a few more minutes passed this way before Xander seemed to have snapped out of his post-coital trance. In Logan’s world, these things don’t have to be as big as ghosts, seances or bogey-men, although sometimes they are. In between the stories are italicized passages that seem to give context on Logan’s composition process, including her writing retreat in Iceland – but it turns out that this is a story, too, split into pieces and shading from autobiography into fiction.

The stories all stem in reality and yet take a warped path through the lands of dark whimsy and haunting nightmare to reach their open-ended conclusions. I was so looking forward to picking up her newest collection of short stories, Things We Say in the Dark, and am pleased to say that it lived up to my very high expectations.