Parallel Hells

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As a whole, this collection — which is full of sensuous, Gothic-inspired stories — takes familiar concepts in the horror genre (the vampire, the Golem, the haunted house, the cursed books, the demons, the possessions, the satanic rituals, the faeries) and breathes new life into them. Perhaps, the unsettling sensation that pervades the novel is no different to Stan’s discomfort when he is shown his own photo.

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. 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. Probably shouldn’t have been reading this at 1:30am now I don’t wanna sleep hahaha full review to come!Is it right to decide that it's ok to remove something negative from somebody else's life without consent? Varied and fast-paced these short stories contain lots of strange and terrifying situations and characters. It tells two stories side by side (quite literally, as there are two columns of text on the page) and both stories are different experiences of the same environment.

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. 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.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”. Is this a story in part about acting in other peoples' interests as YOU see them, and then making a choice not to do that? Reflective surfaces are not far away in Leon Craig’s debut short story collection, Parallel Hells, either. For me I felt like it almost forced me to choose who to empathise with right at the beginning, and the other was almost eclipsed by the one I chose. Alongside his work at Insider, he is also studying for his MA in Literature and the Arts at the University of Oxford.