Parallel Hells

Product Information

In one segment, “The Camera,” the friendship between Stan and Gary, both in their 20s, is strained when Gary begins taking photos of Stan without him knowing.

It's fantasy/light horror with a liberal sprinkling of trauma that makes some of the stories highly arresting, some of them sweet and some of them just very good fun. Craig takes figures and tropes familiar to the horror genre – the vampire, the undead bride, the haunted book in a dusty library, demons, possession, haunted houses – but skilfully integrates them with the sensibilities and concerns of readers today.These juicy, gothic tales draw you in with a warm embrace, detailed settings and characters with personality that transcends the short stories they feature in. Raw pork and opium has one of the more interesting styles of writing explored however the context of the story leaves you going. The agonies of breaking up with a lover, and of feeling oneself adrift in one's late twenties, are subtly captured in several of the longer pieces.

Off the back of that comment about doing this without permission, one thing I did really appreciate in this book was that in one of the stories it featured looks at parts of the BDSM community but really showcased how important consent is to the core of what that community is. Irresistibly strange and inventive, Parallel Hells is a collection of dark and delightful stories that blends folklore and gothic horror with a contemporary twist. I highly recommend this debut if you’re a fan of queer horror that will chew you up and spit you out. Tommy talks about the fear of getting stuck and jamming “like a piece of wood you stick in a wall or something.Frustrated by Luke’s trite ignorance, Carly goes to “find the rest of the party or I can find out how it feels to murder somebody”. As we trace Carly’s column down the page, we follow her brief excursion to a faraway room, where she proceeds to have a seemingly paranormal sexual encounter. But again, this is consistently reimagined, and the narratives never get predictable, largely due to Craig’s wide-ranging source material and the richness of folklore and mythology used to tell tales of outsiders, transformation and reconfiguration. I have given this book three stars because for me they represent not a comment on the author's writing but on the failure of the stories in this collection to match up to the praise and promotion they have received.

The collection is aptly named, as these threads run through all of the thirteen stories which take the reader from a coastal holiday resort in Mexico, to the mythical and medieval Scandinavia, abandoned mansions, and contemporary London. Not at his own reflection but at the mirror,” while the elderly widow at the beginning of the novel stares at her own reflection, fails to see and “just listens”. ok but, why does this collection read weird, like something about the word choices, the writing style, the characterisations, all dated the stories for me in such an odd way that i felt i was looking through amber at each of the stories as i sat down with them. I chose to jump back and forth between the two stories, paragraph by paragraph, but you could read either story in full first then go back and read the other.

His own unconscious prejudice, until this moment, was the previously faceless fact that he had never before been acknowledged. But maybe it’s something to do with living through a pandemic, it just doesn’t scare me as much as it used to… Although don’t get me wrong I am still a wimp haha. 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. One thing I will say is that one of the short stories played with formatting and had two simultaneous narratives occurring at once.