Tim MacGabhann: Saints
Narcotics don’t just run through the veins of the addicts in Saints (2025), but through each of Tim MacGabhann’s stories in his first collection. A former addict himself, MacGabhann’s stories…
Asta Olivia Nordenhof: The Devil Book
Asta Olivia Nordenhof continues to shake her fist at capitalism in The Devil Book (2023, tr: Caroline Waight, 2025), the second volume in her Scandinavian Star septology. In Money To…
Laura McCluskey: The Wolf Tree
Remote Scottish islands have long been good settings for isolating people in literature. In Laura McCluskey’s debut, The Wolf Tree (2025), the two detectives who come ashore on Eilean Eadar,…
Heuijung Hur: Failed Summer Vacation
Failed Summer Vacation (2020, tr: Paige Aniyah Morris, 2025) is a curious collection of seven tales by Korean writer Heuijung Hur. From the outright speculative to the hauntingly personal, its…
Roy Jacobsen: The Burnt-Out Town of Miracles
Up front, I’ll just say I didn’t much like Roy Jacobsen’s The Burnt-Out Town of Miracles (2005; tr: Don Bartlett & Don Shaw, 2007), the first of his books that…
R.D. McLean: The Friday Girl
The city of Dundee sits on the banks of the river Tay before it opens out into the North Sea. Once the city of jute, jam, and journalism, it’s now…
David Barnett: Withered Hill
Withered Hill (2024) is the first foray into folk horror for David Barnett, having previously written, among other things, romantic comedies. One could wryly say this novel, drawing slightly on that…
J.M. Walsh: A Journal
A Journal (2020) by J.M. Walsh is an experimental account of April 2017 through to the end of March the following year. Each entry, though undated, is identifiable by a very…
Asta Olivia Nordenhof: Money To Burn
The Scandinavian Star was a passenger ferry that, in the small hours of April 7th, 1990, went up in flames, killing 159 people. Generally considered an insurance job, given the…
Mark Morris (ed): After Sundown
After Sundown (2020) is the first from an annual non-themed horror anthology by Flame Tree Press. With no particular focus, editor Mark Morris has cast the definition of horror wide,…