Dead Letters Teaser #17

And We, Spectators Always, Everywhere, Kirsten Kaschock When they finally come back to the playground, the boy is in pain. He does not say so, but affects a slight limp. His left foot makes less viable connection with the balance beam than the right. She holds his hand, failing to register this new asymmetry. The boy’s […]

Dead Letters Teaser #16

Ledge Bants, Maria Dahvana Headley & China Miéville Scores of aspects of my memories, my strength, my powers, were exiled from the world. Which turned out to mean that they were hidden, camouflaged in matter, in lost places, fabled gulleys, reachable only by impossible ways. Hence those years of monster-hunting. You should never underestimate the magic […]

Dead Letters Teaser #15

Change Management, Angela Slatter What would it be like to be loved, to be wooed, by someone like Lucy? Dangerous. Uncertain. Different. Oh, so exciting. There would be no ordinariness, nothing banal or commonplace – no status quo, only constant change. The idea threw a frisson down Eva’s spine that was part terror, part elation. […]

Dead Letters Teaser #14

L0ND0N, Nicholas Royle I wasn’t questioning my view about the likability or otherwise of characters, but I was concerned about what I might be getting into. A widely held opinion is that it is a mistake to conflate narrator and author, yet a convergence of Ian and his narrator was precisely what I feared. What […]

Dead Letters Teaser #13

The Hungry Hotel, Lisa Tuttle Soon I was treating him as if we’d met for the first time that day. I ‘made conversation’, asking him about the band, their touring schedule, and he obliged with answers and anecdotes. He tried to take my hand, and I flinched. We had a late, heavy lunch in an […]

Dead Letters Teaser #12

The Days of Our Lives, Adam LG Nevill Inside her vinyl, crab-coloured handbag the ticking was near idle, not so persistent, but far below the pier, in the water, I was distracted by a large, dark shape that might have been a cloud shadow. It appeared to flow beneath the water before disappearing under the […]

Dead Letters Teaser #11

Astray, Nina Allan It is easy to fall into paranoia. All it takes is a tiny seed – opening an envelope that isn’t addressed to you, for instance. I googled Selena Rouane because I was curious, and because I still had the computer on from looking up her street address. It was an offhand, perfunctory […]

Dead Letters Teaser #10

Gone Away, Muriel Gray I had dreamt of trails of clues, secrets unfolding, but here I was once again, the solitary grandchild of a solitary man, dreaming of adventure in the musty bedroom of a gentlewoman’s club in Bloomsbury, with nobody to share my dreams. Opening the mail of a stranger for thrills and receiving […]

Dead Letters Teaser #9

Buyer’s Remorse, Andrew Lane The smell of old paper rose up like some exotic perfume to make my nostrils tingle. Carefully I looked through the pages. From what I could see the text was authentically Pevsner, rather than one of the other writers who had written the Gloucestershire and Kent volumes and who had extended […]

Dead Letters Teaser #8

Is-and, Claire Dean His room was frustratingly bland. She’d expected posters, old CDs, plastic figurines, some traces of him having grown up here. There were just the paintings, more crochet and a crooked twig and wool cross above the bed. She’d read about the crosses, crosh cuirns they were called, in the guidebook. They used […]