David Hartley Bücher

This illustrated collection features nine chilling tales that delve into themes of grief, identity, and supernatural occurrences. Stories include a haunted doll that disturbs a young girl's life, a mother's sorrow observed by a nosy neighbor, and a chilling incantation that leads to unexpected horrors. Other narratives explore family trauma in a former sanatorium, unsettling encounters with mermaids, and the eerie consequences of a fancy dress party. Each story weaves elements of folk horror and the uncanny, creating a captivating and eerie reading experience.

In Hartley's dystopian short stories, animals and humanity go head-to-head. Only one party displays humanity... and it is not the humans. This is a darkly humorous collection of rich language, blurring the lines between nature, nurture and cruelty.

“You have to understand,” says the woman, “an incorcism is nothing like its counterpart. No bells and whistles, no drama. All it takes is willingness, which you already have in spades.”Strange stories about strange things for strange people. Tales of possession and obsession. Of destruction and restoration. Of the demons we hold inside us, and those we leave behind in others. An odd apocalypse freezes a supermarket on Mothers Day, a vanished village holds an ancient curse, an abandoned ice cream van tears a street apart. Rival rainbow setters, the woman who sowed a crop of elephants in her garden, and what happens if you keep on turning the clocks back. Perhaps you had a demon then lost it. Do you miss it?Our time here is brief and so are these curious fables. But the smallest of splinters are the hardest to dig out. Come and be snagged. Come, be unsettled. To be strange is to be human.