Tales of Unease
Edited by Ra Page & Sarah Eyre
Reissued to coincide with the release of Possum, the motion picture adaptation of the story of the same name by Matthew Holness.
Winner of the Shirley Jackson Award 2008.
Specially commissioned stories in response to Freud‘s Theory of the Uncanny.
Outline
In 1919 Sigmund Freud published an essay that delved deep into the tradition of horror writing and claimed to understand one of its darkest tricks. Like a mad scientist, Freud performed literary vivisection on a still-breathing body of work, exploring its inner anatomy, and pulling out mysterious organs for classi cation. His aim: to present to the world a complete theory of das unheimliche, the uncanny.
In the spirit of this great experiment, here, 14 leading authors have here been challenged to write fresh fictional interpretations of what the uncanny might mean in the 21st century, to update Freud’s famous checklist of what gives us the creeps, and to give the hulking canon of uncanny fiction a shot in the arm, a shock to the neck-bolts…
Praise
‘A masterclass in understated creepiness…’ – Book of the Week, Time Out
‘Delightful and disturbing’ – Independent on Sunday
978-1-90558-318-8
BIC: FYB/FK/JMAF
Short Stories/Horror/Freudian July 2018
Bformat Pb 240pp £9.99
Contributors
A.S. Byatt ◆ Christopher Priest ◆ Ramsey Campbell ◆ Etgar Keret ◆ Hanif Kureishi ◆ Sara Maitland ◆ Alison MacLeod ◆ Adam Marek ◆ Jane Rogers ◆ Gerard Woodward ◆ Frank Cottrell Boyce ◆ Ian Duhig ◆ Nicholas Royle ◆ Matthew Holness
Possum
Directed by author Matthew Holness and starring Sean Harris, who is on magni cently twisted form as Philip, a troubled children’s puppeteer who is forced to face up to his wicked stepfather (Alun Armstrong) and the dark and surreal secrets that have tortured him his entire life. Premiering in the UK in June at Edinburgh International Film Festival, and in Ireland in July at Galway Film Festival..