Kirsty Logan

So here we go, into the dark. Some things can't be spoken about in the light of day. But we can visit our fears at night, in the dark. We can turn them over and weigh them in our hands and maybe that will protect us from them. But maybe not. The characters in this collection find their aspirations for happy homes, happy families and happy memories dissected and imbued with shimmering menace. Alone in a remote house in Iceland a woman is unnerved by her isolation; another can only find respite from the clinging ghost that follows her by submerging herself in an overgrown pool. Couples wrestle with a lack of connection to their children; a schoolgirl becomes obsessed with the female anatomical models in a museum; and a cheery account of child's day out is undercut by chilling footnotes. These dark tales explore women's fears with electrifying honesty and invention and speak to one another about female bodies, domestic claustrophobia, desire and violence. From a talented writer who has been compared to Angela Carter, Things We Say in the Dark is a powerful contemporary collection of feminist stories, ranging from vicious fairy tales to disturbing horror and tender ghost stories.

Things We Say in the Dark

Florence

It’s nice to think that if you try hard, you’ll be rewarded. It’s nice to think that if you name a fear, it can’t come true. It’s nice to think that even if it does come true, it can’t possibly be as bad as you think. 

Laura Dobie

She closed all the golden windows and made up all the golden beds and put the golden clothes back on their golden hangers. Then she stood in the middle of the golden house looking at the ugly faience fruit bowl. She couldn't throw it away, because it was valuable. She couldn't sell it, because it was her grampa. She couldn't keep it, because she already had a fruit bowl she liked better and her grampa was gone and keeping his fruit bowl wouldn't bring him back.

They wanted to take horror and flip it into magic, fantasy: just stories they could tell from another life.

This is so amazingly creepy and unsettling.

I could not do sit-ups. I could not climb stairs or drink tea or sleep. I could not go to work or see friends. I could not do anything except hold my body still and feel the scraping of the fingernails.

We tell ourselves stories, we stoke our fears, we keep them burning. For what? What do we expect to find there inside? What are we all doing to ourselves?

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