Cráite - Paperback

Nine stories of body horror, isolation, buried histories, and people discovering that the familiar is often the most frightening thing of all.

From the author of Wax & Wane and Fleischerei comes Cráite, a collection of dark, visceral horror spanning the first five years of Saoirse Ní Chiaragáin's short fiction.

An East German crime-scene photographer discovers the putrid heart beating beneath a divided Berlin. An Irish farmer finds himself sewn into a skin he knows far too well. An American tourist goes looking for family history and discovers something that should have been left to rot.

Across nine stories, Ní Chiaragáin turns loneliness, memory, identity, intimacy, and the human body into sources of dread. Her characters are outsiders, obsessives, travelers, lovers, and lonely people searching for connection in places where something has already gone terribly wrong.

Moving from Ireland to Germany and beyond, Cráite blends body horror, psychological horror, the grotesque, and dark literary fiction into stories concerned as much with what people carry inside themselves as with the monsters waiting outside.

For readers of visceral literary horror, strange short fiction, folk-inflected horror, and stories about transformation, alienation, decay, and the terrible things people discover when they go looking beneath the surface.