“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.
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