Olivia Prior is an orphan who is forced to live at the drab Merilance School for Girls where she’s tormented because she’s nonverbal and can see ghosts. Naturally, when she receives a letter from an unknown uncle inviting her to visit the family home, Gallant, she leaps at the chance. However, when she arrives, she discovers that her uncle is dead and she has become an unwelcome guest in the mansion. But Gallant has secrets that Olivia is desperate to uncover. One day, she crosses a garden wall and sees a different version of Gallant; a dark, decaying manor with a bloodthirsty garden (!!!!!) ruled by a grotesque creature. Olivia must choose between defending our world against the Master, or staying at his side. After her mother remarries, seventeen-year-old Addie is forced to accompany her mother on her honeymoon to a beautiful, remote island. However, the island’s beauty is overshadowed by its dark secrets: wandering ghosts, bloodthirsty flowers, and a deep pool where no one feels pain. Worst of all, Addie realizes that the island may never let her go. Okay, so I love this blurb so much! First, bloodthirsty flowers? YES! And a remote, haunted island? Sign me up!

What could be more satisfying than a single gothic horror story? A collection of them! This anthology features original stories from contemporary BIPOC writers. Blending gothic horror, folklore, and fairytale with “notions of home, memory, grief, and belonging, as well as gentrification, white supremacy, and colonization”, these stories explore what it is to be truly haunted.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. REVIEW - Okay here we go. This is a queer themed collection of fantasy horror stories that vary in length and creepy factor - and which I absolutely loved. The differences between the stories kept things fresh and there were several times when I was left wishing for an entire novel to delve deeper into the characters and story 😍 it’s so cool to see so many examples of spooky, and while I had several favourites within the volume there wasn’t a single story I didn’t find interesting and unique. It also helped that the writing was really lovely and flowed so well 😍

She said: “I could not be happier to be working with Francine Toon and the team atSceptre. Francine is an acutely perceptive, inspired editor as well as a brilliant author in her own right.Sceptreis the home of many of my favourite writers and I'm awed to be in such good company.” The publisher explained: “ Parallel Hellsuses elements of folklore, horror and the gothic to explore the politics of sexuality, gender, the body, love and loneliness. The 13audacious stories take us into the world of night hags, golems, vampires, warrior women, fairies and corpse brides who live in contemporary London, 18th-century Poland and Viking-era Iceland. Threaded throughout are timely and political metaphors about queerness, gender fluidity, kink, otherness and womanhood.”A golem discovers its powers far exceed its Creator’s expectations. An ancient creature, who feasts on the shame of modern-day Londoners, struggles to fit in with friends they will long outlive. And an Oxford historian discovers an antique tome that may help her overcome her academic rivals. I’m so glad that spooky queer books seem to be more abundant these past few years as I’ve definitely found a new favourite genre. I recommend this to anyone who likes dark and macabre books or to anyone who fancies trying something new since there are so many different tales to sink your teeth into. Craig grew up in north London and although she describes her family as not “particularly devout,” being Jewish is something she has always been proud of. Berlin is, she says, a really great place to be queer but she has found living amongst the Stolpersteine, unsettling. “I’m hardly the first Jewish person to say this about them, but I also think there are quite a few other countries who could perhaps do better at remembering these things.” raw pork and opium: 2 stars, I liked the 2 parallel perspectives up until the girl had sex with her friend because he suddenly had boobs and then told him that she did not want him and was the other part a metaphor for how gay the two men are for each other? I will never know. 3 stars taken off because this read like a bad fanfic of The Secret History which is already a bad fan fiction of If we were villains (yes I know TSH preceded IWWV and no, I do not accept criticism on this statement)

Anyway, she discovers that her task is far more difficult than she anticipated; people are hostile towards her, she begins to hear disembodied footsteps, frantic ax chopping sounds, and occasionally feels a phantom touch on her shoulder (I would actually run out screaming at this point but I digress…). The haunted house rumors appear to be true, and Ursula realizes that she is in mortal danger. Trust me: you want to read this. It's the queer horror book of your dreams. -- Kirsty Logan (November 2021) Think, a very creepy Stranger Things with a nonverbal protagonist who may turn over to the evil side.

My Book Notes

Unfinished and Unformed: 1 star, confused about the queer component of this, also uncomfortable and inelegant In this glorious and twisted collection of short stories, Leon Craig uses folklore and gothic horror to “explore queer identity, love, power and the complicated nature of being human.” The thirteen stories follow a golem whose powers far surpass its Creator’s expectations, a lonely demon who feeds on shame, a woman who plans a Satanic ritual to disconnect from her trauma, and more beings, to analyze the human condition via a queer lens. The stories include a murderous anti-heroine in 10th Century Viking-era Iceland who becomes suspicious of her husband’s relationship with his best friend; an ancient being who feasts on 21st Century Londoners and an Oxford University historian who delights in using occult methods from a medieval tome on her nemesis. Vampires, corpse brides, fairy curses all feature, as does Jewish folklore. In The Bequest, a woman is possessed by a dybbuk when she discovers more about her family history than she anticipated and in Unfinished and Unformed, a golem’s powers exceed the expectations of its creator. Read this book if you: Enjoy playing imaginary games in the woods, you want revenge on your ex, you think doing ritual sacrifice in a graveyard is cool actually, you enjoy Nordic mythology

For fans of Daisy Johnson and Kirsty Logan, a gothic short story collection for winter nights from an emerging voice in British literary fiction Ingratitude: 3 stars, genuinely creepy as hell, mother of the year award goes to "Mother", this would have been the perfect excuse to have an aroace character in your collectionThe short, twisted tales collected in Leon Craig's Parallel Hells have a laconic elegance that's both chilling and pleasurable' Financial Times But as well as this, these stories also make you ask really interesting questions. One of my favourites was called "Hags", about a demon that after hundreds of years of being alive has refined their diet down to one thing. They feed on shame. You have this story telling you about the demon's past, their relationship with their friends, their guilt over lying and presenting themselves as a human to people they've genuinely come to like, and then talks about shame as a negative emotion. If it's removed is that always a good thing? Is it right to decide that it's ok to remove something negative from somebody else's life without consent? 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? These stories I think are really multilayered. This decadent and distorted collection of queer gothic short stories didn't disappoint. * Brixton Review of Books * When writer-editor Leon Craig realised that she was not quite ready to write the novel she had been ruminating for some time, she turned to short stories. “I had this big project that I couldn’t quite get into and so, while honing my own style, I started writing short stories as an experiment,” she explains. “It gave me a lot of freedom. Then the stories took on more and more form and started coalescing into a collection.”