Parallel Hells

In 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.

Some
say that hell is other people and some say hell is loneliness …

In the thirteen darkly audacious stories of Parallel
Hells we meet a golem, made of clay, learning that its powers far exceed
its Creator’s expectations; a ruined mansion which grants the secret wishes
of a group of revellers and a notorious murderer who discovers her Viking
husband is not what he seems.

Asta
is an ancient being who feasts on the shame of contemporary Londoners, who
now, beyond anything, wishes only to fit in with a group of friends they will
long outlive. An Oxford historian, in bitter competition with the rest of her
faculty members, discovers an ancient tome whose sinister contents might
solve her problems. Livia orchestrates a Satanic mass to distract herself
from a recently remembered trauma and two lovers must resolve their
differences in order to defy a lethal curse.