Salt Slow by  Julia Armfield

Salt Slow

Julia Armfield

Slyly beautiful, and with a teasingly unnerving relationship to reality, this short story collection will seductively detour you into the uncanny. This is a place where boundaries blur and merge: between land and sea, skin and bone, human and animal, the mythic and the everyday. The horror-lore of vampires and werewolves lurks here, but only in shadow-glimpses; what gives this collection its greatest power is its profound emotionality.

Extract

When the woman who lived across the street from us adopted a wolf and brought it to live with her, people were not as surprised as you might imagine. People had been doing stranger things in our neighbourhood for years.... My Father said a town was only as interesting as its bad apples and only as safe as its lunatics. When my sister and I were younger, he would point to all the houses on our street, counting on his fingers and explaining that by the law of averages, at least two of our neighbours were likely to commit murder.

Parallels
  • Her Body and Other Parties by Carmen Maria Machado
  • Blow-Up an Other Stories by Julio Cortazar
  • The Dangers of Smoking in Bed by Mariana Enriques