by Sarah Hall, Adam Thorpe, Graeme Macrae Burnet
First published 2019
In Sarah Hall's provocative collection, monsters slip between folklore and contemporary nightmare. Each story rewrites the boundary between human and inhuman, revealing creatures born from landscape, memory, and visceral transformation. A woman encounters an impossible beast in Cumbrian moorlands. A genetic experiment creates something neither animal nor human. Another tale tracks a mythic predator stalking industrial borderlands. These are not supernatural fantasies, but precise anatomies of mutation—where biological impulse meets cultural anxiety. Hall dissects how marginalized beings reflect our deepest unspoken fears, rendering each monster as a complex emotional ecosystem. Her prose cuts like surgical steel: exact, unflinching, alive with biological intelligence.
Genres: short-stories, literary-fiction, fantasy, horror
Vibes: dark, intimate, thought-provoking
Tropes: body-horror, creature-feature
Setting: Cumbria, Industrial Borderlands
157 pages · Kindle Edition · September Publishing
Content warnings: body-horror, gore