things we say in the dark by kirsty logan

So I guess you can never really know anything.Īlice and I gathered up the ring and the paper and the horse and the pearls and the hair and the glass jar and the knife, and we put them all in a box. Then again, we knew that her bathtub drowning was due to a stroke. Her mistake, her haunting, was in keeping the thing.

Alice had told me that a silver knife through the heart is the only way to kill a kelpie, so if Alice’s gran really had killed it, the knife was likely to be there somewhere. It wasn’t easy: to find it we’d had to pull up just about every rotting, stinking board in the house, our hands slick with blood and filth. I wasn’t surprised when Alice and I found the long thin silver knife wrapped in blackened grot beneath the floorboards. Here’s an excerpt from the story to whet your appetite: My favourite story was “Things My Wife and I Found Hidden in Our House,” about a series of objects Rain and her wife Alice find in the derelict house Alice’s granny has left them. In between the stories are italicized passages that seem to give context on Logan’s composition process, including her writing retreat in Iceland – but it turns out that this is a story, too, split into pieces and shading from autobiography into fiction.įull of magic realism and gentle horror, this is a book for fans of Salt Slow and The Doll’s Alphabet. “Girls Are Always Hungry when All the Men Are Bite-Size” and “The Only Thing I Can’t Tell You Is Why.” The titles can be like mini-tales in their own right, e.g. Others are in unusual formats like footnotes, a questionnaire, bullet-pointed lists, or a couple’s contrasting notes on house viewings. Some stories are divided into multiple parts by headings or point-of-view changes. I also recognized some of the same sorts of Celtic sea legends that infuse Logan’s debut novel, The Gracekeepers. Ghosts and corpses are frequent presences.

Body parts are offered as tokens of love or left behind as the sole evidence of an abduction. Many of these 20 stories twist fairy tale imagery into nightmarish scenarios, enumerating fears of bodies and pregnancies going wrong.

It’s an honour to be kicking off the official Swansea University International Dylan Thomas Prize 2020* blog tour with a post introducing and giving an excerpt from one of this year’s longlisted titles, the short story collection Things We Say in the Dark by Kirsty Logan.

Things we say in the dark by kirsty logan