![]() But he’s neither a ghost nor a vampire, but just an ever-present, unspeaking presence – like a metaphor taking a solid shape. Some examples… Out of the Blue features a father who comes back from the dead. And they’re brilliant.īirnie’s are unsettling stories which, as in Dollface, sometimes refer to or make use of established horror tropes, only to subvert them and create something new and more peculiar. Although the volume includes stories which have previously been in print, most of the tales are new to this collection. There is, throughout the story, a feeling of a rather drab normality going askew, a sense that something is disturbingly “off”, a flavour of ambiguity which invites readers to draw their own conclusions.ĭollface returns in I would Haunt You if I Could, Birnie’s debut collection of short stories issued this month by Canadian independent press Undertow Publications. ![]() Yet, Birnie is less interested in the scares, than in the web of relationships between the narrator and his neighbour and their respective families. Dollface, his contribution to that volume, features an apparently evil or cursed doll, a clear nod to a common trope of contemporary horror fiction. I first came across the work of Seán Padraic Birnie in the eighth instalment of Michael Kelly’s anthology of weird fiction Shadows and Tall Trees. ![]()
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