![]() 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. ![]()
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