Emma Dee is a prose fiction writer interested in the Gothic, the weird, and the transgressive mundanity of everyday relationships. She is a graduate of the University of Kent and holds a PhD in Writing the Novel. Her work has been published in print and online. In addition to writing strange, fantastic fiction, she has recently completed a novel of Gothic Horror proportions and content. When not at work at the dark literary arts, she can be found exploring the coast, or at home with her black cat Bram.

My earliest memory is of running up a small hill in my nursery school garden. We had just finished watching Disney’s ‘The Little Mermaid’ and obviously it had quite the effect on me. I could have only been about three or four, and I remember getting to the top of this small rise – it must have been very small, I was small myself, yet it felt massive – and looking out over the grass, the sky very blue, like in all childhood memories, and I was overwhelmed with this feeling rising up inside of me, that the world would never be big enough for the way I felt inside. Melodramatic stuff, but I suppose I always had a somewhat poetic soul.

The last time I cried was when I was watching Cyrano de Bergerac with Adrian Lester at The Swan Theatre in Stratford-Upon-Avon. We were right by the stage, close enough to see the sweat, and it was terribly moving. We were all sobbing.

Growing up I always wanted to be an ‘author’ as I called it then. Why not a writer? I suppose ‘author’ conveys a certain level of gravitas - you’ve made it - sort of thing. I do also quite like the term ‘writetrix’. But I had always wanted to be ‘an author’, except for the glorious summer of 1997 when I wanted to be Pocahontas and ran around the garden barefoot, and slept under my sheepskin rug (my understanding of what it meant to be Pocahontas was clearly rather lacking).

I deal with stress by baking, and cooking, which is good in some respects. I also enjoy a good run or boxing class. And of course, I write to understand a situation or question.

My spookiest experience was when I was working as a Parlour maid in the Governor’s Household on St Helena, remote island in the South Atlantic. There were lots of stories about Plantation House, as it is called. It was a very old house, and most significantly, felt watchful when you were working there alone. As if the house was turning inward and observing you whilst you polished. I remember being downstairs in the Blue Room, cleaning, and I could hear a piano being played – practiced – distinctly in the house. It was only later that I remembered the only piano in the house was in the Blue Room with me, and I, nor anyone else, was not playing it at the time.

My favourite author is Angela Carter, I live conspicuously in her shadow, and in reverent awe.

The first story I remember hearing or reading is ‘Fantastic Mr Fox’ by Roald Dahl. Apparently I came running down the stairs after bedtime waving the book, saying this is the best book ever! I don’t remember that bit, but I do remember the nefarious thrill of reading a book when I was supposed to be asleep. And I do remember reading the final line, and being so awestruck by the sheer perfection of Dahl’s storytelling.

The best piece of writing advice I ever got was to never undersell yourself. Don’t premise anything with: ‘this isn’t very good but…’ After all, we know our work better than anyone. So if you tell people it’s crap, they’ll probably believe you! That, and: I think you find writing easy, so you don’t try very hard. (This is also accompanied by John Cooper Clarke saying something along the lines of: if everyone tells you you’re wonderful, you don’t tend to be very good!)

My biggest inspiration is the Gothic mode. I obviously have a very macabre side, and I find the questions of the Gothic so rich and intriguing. The Gothic often brings together two things more properly kept apart - life and death being an obvious one, or the past and the present. I think the Gothic is a kind of psychoanalysis (thank you, Freud), and in it we can find many answers, literal and metaphorical, to our fears.

My favourite fairytale/mythological/folkloric creature is the werewolf. I love the familiar and the strange in them, again, the bringing together of two things that should really remain apart. Maybe it’s the excuse to do violent or wild acts, and yet also without any moral responsibility.

My go-to cure for writer’s block? I like to have a writing ritual. I often like to burn a candle, and have some tea. Most significantly, I have to have a desk or space that allows for me to leave everything out in the open, and I don’t have to worry about putting things away or tidying. The less barriers to the actual writing, the better.

The Fantastic Writers Collective is a group of UK-based writers who enjoy telling stories about the weird and the wonderful.

Our debut anthology is available here.

For Sale

By Louisa Todd

The shed was gloomy and smelled of potting compost and Polo mints. Old earth, dry and dusty, with a faint tang of a long-banned fertiliser. The skin-thin windowpanes were cobwebby, so old they were thicker at the bottom. Any spiders were long dead or run away; there had been no prey venturing here for years. The only thing left was a broken plant pot, its plastic terracotta shell dulled by dried rain and dust. Everything else had gone into the mini-skip last week – rotten, rusted wood-handled tools, pieces of lawn mowers the scrap man wouldn’t take, broken plates Nana had lost from the kitchen set that Grandad swore he hadn’t seen. Jam jars with paint-stained turps that my husband threw in from a distance, as if they were live grenades.

‘It needs to evaporate,’ he said when I protested, ‘or we can have a fire, if you like?’

I declined.

The pot sat there in the shed, waiting its turn to be useful again: a holding-place for the little mail-order and garden centre rescue lives my grandad had nurtured, until they were big enough to brave it out in the tidy little garden. He had probably nursed hundreds of plants back to life in that pot, used it every day. It probably wouldn’t disintegrate for a thousand years or more. How selfish, how god-like, for people to make things, with relatively little effort, that would last several of their lifetimes – or forever in some form, to be exploded into atoms at the death of the universe. How strange that people preserved some things and not others, because they had belonged to people.

‘It’s very her,’ they’d say, ‘it’s like she’s here with us,’ when it was nothing of the sort. You kept the thing, the photograph, because you wanted the person. My great aunt had kept a pipe of her husband’s, chewed and reeking on a saucer on her mantelpiece. Her sister had tried to get her to throw it away.

‘I can’t,’ she’d said. ‘What would he think? He’s only ten years dead.’

When my parents and aunts had divided up the house contents, I’d chosen a mother-of-pearl necklace of my Nana’s and a painting of my Grandad’s.

Grandad had dabbled in his shed and had copied some of the greats with intense care but not much accuracy, from a library book so tiny that the details were lost in swirls of colour. One of my earliest memories of him is standing next to him in the shed, my head no higher than his knee, watching him as he painted. He gave me a brush to hold, but no paint – it was oil, and wouldn’t come off my fingers or clothes and he would have been in trouble with Nana.

From his selection of works, I picked an inaccurate copy of The Haywain, painted on the back of a piece of wallpaper. I was particularly fond of the grey-brown blob he had daubed instead of a sheep; he couldn’t do animals that didn’t have a personality, he’d said. I hung it on the living room wall where it clashed with the curtains, but I wasn’t fooled. He was gone.

I gave the shed a final sweep - just moving the particles around, really - with the faithful yard brush. My grandad had loved that brush.

‘You don’t get quality like this anymore,’ he’d say, winking at whoever was nearby, ‘Fifteen years, and it’s only had three new heads and two new handles.’ It was his favourite joke.

If anything had been imbued with his spirit, his soul, it would have been that brush, and that plastic plant pot, not his war medals that he never looked at or talked about, or his wedding ring that he never wore for fear of losing. But my dad and aunts fought over the medals and the ring, and left the brush and the pot. I put the brush back in its place beside the door, where he had always kept it.

The rest of the house was empty, ready for the viewers to snigger at the wallpaper and carpets, the colours and patterns worn but clean. I wandered about, checking for anything we might have left in the clear-out, anything that might put someone off the place, not see its potential. The bathroom, the converted old coal store and pantry next to the kitchen, still smelled of Nana - Oil of Ulay and Cuticura Medicated talc. Euthymol Smoker’s Tooth Powder and TCP. It was a noxious combination, wafting over at inconvenient times, like when you were politely forcing down cucumber-and-vinegar sandwiches and over-milked Tetley’s, all with the unspoken agreement never to mention the fact that your weekly afternoon tea was inches and a very thin folding door (that didn’t quite shut properly) away from where your nana took a shit.

The first thing any new buyer would do is rip the kitchen out, build an extension, move the bathroom upstairs, like everyone else in the street of two-up, two-down houses had done. I remembered nights of deciding whether to brave the stairs and the good room and the cold lino kitchen floor in the dark to go for a wee, risking waking the whole street with the temperamental flush, or put up with the panic-dreams and fear of wetting the bed. How they had managed to raise three children here, I didn’t know. Once I had learned this was where they had lived all their lives, it was no longer a mystery to me why my aunts barely spoke to my dad as adults – he had told me of ‘his room’ growing up, and I had imagined an enormous home where everyone had their own space, but my dad, the youngest, had the second bedroom, and my aunts had shared the settee.

I went to check upstairs again. The stairs creaked on the third and seventh steps like they always had. I’d never been into the master bedroom until my grandad had become ill. It had been their private place, but in the last weeks it had been ‘like Piccadilly Circus’ he’d said, though he’d never been there. He’d laid in the bed with his knees drawn up under the blood-red eiderdown, and I’d wondered, was that how he normally slept? He’d held the pain from his eyes, from us, putting up with the intrusion of cleaning and moving and clothes-changing, never complaining except when the doctor came. Non-compliant, the doctor had written. After a brief argument, he was a DNR at hospital. ‘I’ve had enough,’ he’d say, at 71. ‘Let me be. I’ll be all right.’

My dad had been there when my grandad passed away, and when they got back from the hospital he hugged me, the first time since I was a small child. I tried not to recoil.

‘It’s all right, Dad.’ What else could I say?

‘You were his favourite, you know,’ he said, choked up. ‘He never let any of the other kids into the shed.’

Six years later, Nana died, and here I was. She had a heart condition and refused to take her pills.

‘I’m all right,’ she would say, tight-lipped and cross-armed, ‘Leave me be.’

The carpet in the bedrooms was worn in paths around where the beds used to be. Little round indents where the sideboard and chest of drawers had stood, covered in bags and boxes of tablets, inhalers and unspeakable things from the pharmacy. I could see foot-shaped indents where my nana and grandad had planted their slippers, morning and night, every day – or maybe I was just imagining them.

My aunt had found her, asleep forever, an untouched cup of tea on the bedside table. She had tidied everything up. Her laundry washed and put away, hoovering done. There was only a half-pint of milk, a packet of bacon and a sliver of lard in the fridge. Two eggs on the counter in the Tupperware box. Dishcloth neatly folded and hung over the tap. A brown sliced and a box of Mr Kipling’s French Fancies, my aunt’s favourite, in the bread bin. A shiver of grief hit me and I wiped my face with my hand.

Downstairs, I straightened the curtains in the front room, still dusty despite a wash and beating. Like everything else, they seemed to be disintegrating, shedding particles like a butterfly wing. A few more weeks of opening and closing, and they would disappear altogether, as if they had never existed as curtains, but only dust motes caught in a sunbeam in a momentary shape. I ran my finger under the sill, the way my nana checked. It was clean. We’d cleaned everything, me and my mother. Scrubbed the sink shiny. Scraped the corners of the lino that Nana hadn’t been able to reach. Removing every cell of them.

My dad hadn’t wanted to be there: too difficult, he said, though we knew an excuse when we heard it.

We’d thought about taking the twee red wishing-well out of the front garden. The little white pointed roof stood out starkly against the hedges. Now quite crumbly, more paint than wood, my grandad had added another layer of red to it religiously each year after the last frost. The solitary gnome concreted to the edge held his tiny fists out determinedly in front of him, gripping an invisible fishing rod that I couldn’t ever remember being there. The well had seemed huge when I was a child, crunching the gravel as I walked in circles around it, chanting for fairies. I’d looked out for it on the walk down the street, not able to read numbers yet. Now it seemed tiny, quaint, an affectation. I didn’t think it would last a week with new inhabitants, but I wasn’t going to touch it. I imagined that when they finally broke it apart, there would be piles of old coins, lost keys and doll heads, love letters, maybe the cat that went missing 20 years ago, a diamond ring tangled in the moss, Australia. More likely it was just a foot of roots and woodlice.

The estate agent’s sign had been haphazardly shoved into the flower bed and was leaning over. They probably hadn’t even got out of the van. I went outside and straightened it up. It had a ‘viewing by appointment only’ card attached to it. As if anyone would walk up to a stranger’s house in this day and age and simply ask for a look round. I’d often heard my grandad and his sisters talking about their heyday, and how they could go on a caravan-and-bingo holiday to Skegness for July Fortnight and leave their house unlocked. My grandparents hadn’t used the lock on their front door until 1951. Five years ago we’d put on a deadbolt and chain and a note reminding them to use it, even if they thought it was us.

I tied up the last black bag and moved the bin out to the pavement to join its friends. It was done, ready for the new. I was glad to leave, to be released from this house where now there was only pain, badly expressed. Next door’s curtains twitched, and I waved solemnly to Mrs Bridie as her little white face pressed up against the glass. She was mouthing something. She was the last one in the street to get double glazing, and I wasn’t sure she knew how to work it. She pointed at the For Sale sign and then at her tiny wrist, where a watch would go. I held up 3 fingers and shrugged my shoulders. She nodded sagely, waggled her fingers at me sadly, and withdrew.

I locked the door. The agent would be here soon with the first viewers. It was a nice day, and I hoped they’d buy it.

When you get your paws on Running with the Pack, our anthology of spooky stories and perplexing poetry (which you will of course, why wouldn’t you? Here’s a helpful link to our online shop) the first thing you’ll say to yourself will be ‘isn’t that a perfectly harmonious page layout?’ And you’ll be right.

This beautiful page layout is the same as has been used for hundreds of years in book production, right up until the point in the late 1980s when the wretched coder who invented Microsoft Word set all the page margins to a default of 1.5cm (or something), and then no-one bothered to change them ever again. Apart from me. For the page layout used in our anthology is based on the ‘Van Def Graaf Canon’, used in Gutenberg’s bible of 1455, and also (because we’re using square pages, which is a bit outré) we used Honnecourt’s 13th Century ‘Villard’s Figure’ which harmoniously sub-divides lines.

But why? you ask.

Because I am a medieval book geometry nerd; a select, erudite, if rather unkempt and shabby bunch, but come with me while I paint you a picture of what passes for entertainment in the medieval book geometry world.

First of all, think about what it meant to be a geometry boffin in medieval times. It is very different to what we think of as geometry in the modern world, with its protractors and angles and maths and calculators and squared paper and staring out of the maths classroom window, wishing we were elsewhere.

Before we get on to harmonious book pages, lets have a look of the those triumphs of medieval geometries; cathedrals. Take a look at a cathedral window. Incredible, intricate, symmetrical, harmonious geometrical designs. Wow! That must have taken some serious CAD software right?

Well, obviously no.

Firstly no-one had really invented units of measurement; yes there were foots and spans and furlongs, but they depended on the individual doing the measuring and how big their feet and hand spans were (and whatever body-part a furlong is). Having a length that equated to one inch that everyone agreed on was hundreds of years off. And centimetres were just some wild frenchified fever dream of the distant future.

Secondly, you couldn’t just jot some geometric designs down on paper, or vellum as it was known, because vellum was sensationally expensive and required the wholesale murder of many trips of goats. (‘Trip’: collective noun for goats. Yes. Really.) Medieval geometers literally scratched in the dirt. Or in some plaster or wax if they were posh. In York Minster you can see the room that the master mason worked in; the floor is covered in plaster where he scratched the elaborate designs for windows and columns. And when he was done they replastered the floor.

So what could our medieval geometer actually scratch in the dirt? Two things; straight lines (put two styli at either end of the line you want and then pull some twine tight between them and that gives you a straight line) and circles (put a stylus in the centre of the circle you want, tie twine to it, fix another stylus along the twine and then pull it round in a circle).

And that’s it.

I mean, very posh geometers might have got a smith to make them a pair of callipers to make scratching circles easier, and a woodcarver to make a straight edged pole for straight lines, but they weren’t necessary.

Once you could do straight lines and circles, and knew what proportions to scratch them in, all you had to do was add a whole life time of skill and experience and creative genius to design a cathedral. But a cathedral is just lines and circles in perfect proportions, and it’s those perfect proportions that matter; medieval geometry is not about measurement and definite units like modern maths, it’s all about proportions and how the size of one thing relates to another. The thing that makes a proportion a good proportion is whether it’s beautiful. Medieval geometers used geometry to create beauty. I call this Wild Geometry and I love it.

‘Now that’s interesting’, I hear you say, ‘I just happened to be in Norwich Cathedral last Tuesday and I measured the length of the cloister, and the length of the nave and I noticed that those lengths are in the proportion of one to the square root of two.

‘And then on Wednesday I measured the size of the transepts, the altar and aspe, and the chantry and they’re all rectangles in the so called Golden ratio.’

The Golden Ratio is all over the place in architecture and nature. The Ancient Greeks loved a good Golden Ratio; the Parthenon is stuffed with them and you can’t throw an archbishop in a cathedral without them getting their cassock entangled in a Golden Ratio.

If we think about these two ratios in the way a modern mathematician would, then they are both crazy irrational numbers.

This is (approximately) the square root of two:

1.414213562373095048801688724209698078569671875376948073176679…

These decimal places go on forever and never repeat. Someone with a computer and too much time on their hands recently calculated to the square root of two to twenty four trillion decimal places.

Similarly the Golden Ratio is 1 to a number that mathematicians call the Green letter phi φ.

φ is approximately 1.61803398874989484820458683436563811772030917980576…

Like the square root of two these decimals go on forever.

As a modern geometer to make a Golden Rectangle, where the length and width are in the proportion 1 to φ, you’d draw a line, measure it, then get your phone out (or your calculator if you’re over 50) and multiply that length by 1.618ish, then draw your rectangle.

But our medieval geometer couldn’t do any of that; couldn’t measure a line, couldn’t understand what 1.618ish is (decimal points weren’t invented until 1595), and couldn’t get their phone out. But even the Ancient Greeks managed to create architecture with Golden Rectangles in them, and the Ancient Greeks were so ancient even calculators hadn’t been invented then.

So how did they do it?

You got it; the Wild Geometry of straight lines and circles only.

And actually it’s fairly easy. Let’s go back to the ratio of 1 to the square root of two.

Draw a square; that’s four straight lines at right angles. You can create a right angle using intersecting circles. Then draw a straight line between opposite corners of the square and the proportion between the length of that diagonal line and one of the sides of the square is one to the square root of two. I’ll spare you the Pythagoras that shows this to be true, but that’s a crazy irrational, but beautifully harmonious proportion from straight lines and circles. The cloister of a cathedral is a square anyway, so the chances are that the builders built a square cloister, then stretched a rope across its diagonal, then used that rope to determine how big the nave was going to be.

The construction of a Golden Rectangle is a bit more complex than just drawing a diagonal across a square to get the square root of two, but not much more complex.

‘Yes, yes, yes,’ you say, ‘I came here for the book layout, not the cathedrals. What has this to do with the page layout of your highly recommended anthology Running with the Pack?’

Medieval book designers had exactly the same limitations as medieval cathedral builders (except book designers did have vellum to draw on), and the layout of our anthology is made from just straight lines and circles according to rules of perfect proportions developed over centuries and encoded by J. A. Van der Graaf in the 15th century. I only cheated a little bit by using a set square to create right angles instead of using intersecting circles.

First of all we decided on the page size, as determined by our printers, and then I drew out that page size. Then comes the Wild Geometry; everything else is ‘simply’ done by ruling lines across the page, and then drawing lines from their intersections. No measurements, no maths, no calculators. And the brilliant, beautiful thing about the Van den Graaf Canon is that it always works, no matter how big the page is; it is not about explicit modern measurements, it is all about beautiful medieval proportions.

There’s something about this approach I love; and it’s not just some regressive Luddite nostalgia. Remember that a cathedral is just lines, circles, proportions and a lifetime of skill and creativity? Well the thing is, when a cathedral becomes a CAD package and a bit of skill, or God help us, the result of a ChatGPT query and no skill at all, then the lifetime of skill and creativity can get lost in the noise of technology.

There’s a difference between technical skill and aesthetic skill. The technical skills in drawing straight lines and circles are small, whereas as the technical skills in wrestling Photoshop into doing something valuable are enormous. Maybe in the heads of medieval geometers there was more room for the aesthetic skills, as follows…

Obviously this is a crude simplification, and maybe a bit golden-agey about 1380. Probably what was going on in a medieval designer’s head was more like this…

…but then there is a corresponding modern argument…

Anyway, Wild Geometry at least supplies a little perspective. Adobe force us to download an upgrade to their disgustingly expensive Photoshop every four days, and then cover the interface in little prompts pointing out all the New Exciting Things you can do. All these New Exciting Things! Except I can design a beautiful book page layout or a cathedral window with a pencil, ruler, compass and paper, and I can design them in a wonderful silence that allows me to focus on the beauty of the thing being designed, not be drowned out by all the noisy technology and its New Exciting Things. And I can feel the touch of the ghosts of medieval geometers who didn’t divide the world into art (creative and lovely) and science (dull and formulaic); they just discovered wonderful tools and conceptions to create beauty.

(Further reading: The Secret Law of Page Harmony.)

Richard is an artist, author and print-maker who aims to establish a completely sustainable practice where all his tools and materials are hand-made from recycled or foraged sources. He is discovering that achieving this aim isn’t as easy as it sounds.

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The Fantastic Writers Collective is a group of UK-based writers who enjoy telling stories about the weird and the wonderful.

Our debut anthology is available here.

I’m Not a Mouse and She’s Not a Cat

Helen Harjak

She gets me banned. They suspend my account. It’s embarrassing to admit, but I have one of those who-am-I-without-my-followers breakdowns. I’ve spent so long building my brand. Seeing it all disappear hurts unlike anything that has ever hurt before.

I pass a few days just staring at the eggshell-coloured walls of my flat. They’re mostly blank; I’ve never had much time to decorate. I’ve put up a replica of the poster where the cat devours a suffragette. They distributed these back in the day to inform the public of how the Liberal Party mistreated the imprisoned protesters. The Cat and Mouse Act. I glare at the cat’s bloodied fangs and wonder if I’m the mouse in our scenario. On some level, the power disparity between Anthea Lambros and me isn’t that vast. On the platform, we were equals. Yet, for the wider industry – the establishment, to use that paranoid word – she’s a god.

My mind swarming with thoughts of revenge, I dive into the Dark Web and make some connections. They offer to sell me drugs and child pornography. I hatch increasingly abhorrent plans until I come across the Time Doctor. They say they can take me back to the right moment, stop me from posting that one phrase that gave Anthea all the ammunition. But there is, of course, a price.

It’s one of those pacts that doesn’t seem too bad to begin with. Every night between 1 a.m. and 7 a.m. I’d undergo a metamorphosis and become a spider. I can manage six hours, I think. Who cares if I sleep as a human or a spider? 1 a.m. allows me sufficient leeway to go out, bring someone home and get rid of them in time – or simply eat them if I end up turning into a particularly large spider.

I get my followers back and send some zingers in Anthea’s direction. Knowing what she’s going to write about next gives me extra material. Even though I’m in the mood to celebrate in the evening, I don’t make plans with friends because I don’t know how the change will happen. By 12:59 a.m. I’m lying in the middle of my bed. I have one last look at the platform and put away my phone.

I breathe in and out and wait. When the pain hits, I feel all my organs grind together into mush. My limbs curl inwards. I manage to push them out; they are long and hairy, tentacle-like. I use them to raise my torso. To my pleasure, I realise I’m rather large. I amble off the bed towards the big mirror in the hallway. My reflection is so grotesque I can’t help but grin, although smiles don’t come across very well when you’re a spider. My squashed organs rumble hollow. I rush to the kitchen where my legs prove inadequate for opening vacuum-sealed doors. I poke at the cereal boxes; they fail to interest me. It’s meat I crave – and I know whose meat.

I worry that I’ll have trouble navigating the outside world but soon find myself able to climb buildings and move across rooftops. Releasing gossamer threads is as easy as spitting, only it’s done through my navel. As the fragrant spring breeze urges me onwards, I feel lighter than I have felt for some time. I dart from building to building above the clamour and the sirens of the city.

It takes me a while to find my way. I know her address, though I can’t exactly use my phone to map out the route. It’s one of those large North London terraced houses with lush magnolia trees and a pillar-box red door. I could never live somewhere like that, even if I saved every penny I earned. And she had the audacity to tell me she had suffered, that I didn’t know what I was talking about because I had never experienced real workplace sexism. I smack my spider-mouth and think about tearing into her pale, ageing skin. At least it would be largely hairless, perhaps like eating boiled pork fat. The idea of it makes me salivate.

I resolve to try the large bay window at the back. It seems the kind of place a woman her age might have her boudoir. Although she would probably baulk at the word boudoir, say it’s her dominion or something. I scurry closer to the window. My supple limbs tremble from excitement as they grip the grooves in the brick walls. I need to hang upside down to peek past the floral ruffled curtains – I guess generational taste isn’t something you can escape. All I can see is my own reflection. When a giant spider reaches out and touches one of my legs, I freak out. I spit towards a nearby tree, but it’s already climbing on me. We struggle and both sway on my thin thread before tumbling to the ground.

We untangle our legs and retreat, eye each other from the opposite corners of the garden. She hoists herself up using a large oak. Not to be bested, I throw myself on the adjacent sycamore. Soon, she’s shooting threads at me, and I shoot back. When a pattern begins to emerge, she scrambles to the middle. We move in parallel, in a dance of creation. I notice how she shows signs of wear. One of her limbs is shorter, dangling helplessly. There are scratch marks on her back and something filmy on three of her eyes. It’s still dark, a few hours to go until sunrise. In the morning I will ask her a question.

*Originally published on 27 November 2021 in Fudoki Magazine

Helen Harjak grew up in Tallinn, Estonia, attended university in Edinburgh, and now lives in London, where she works as a freelance writer and editor. She’s working on her debut collection of short stories about girls and women who travel and emigrate, escape and disappear.

The Fantastic Writers Collective is a group of UK-based writers who enjoy telling stories about the weird and the wonderful.

Our debut anthology IS OUT NOW and available here.

Subscribe to Fantastic for updates, as well as flash fiction, poetry and musings about books, writing and the thing lurking under the bed.

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Consequence

By Louise Todd

Kade did not know where she was. There was a figure in black, much shorter than her, silently shuffling ahead, leading her. Her feet were bare and she wore a thin gown, her arms goose-fleshed. Her hair hung limply over her bare shoulders.

‘Where am I?’ she said.

The hooded figure led her down a line of empty prison cells, squares of open bars in a long line of others. There was a faint noise, like a distant trapped animal. The cells held dust, grey and black, in piles and spread around in breath-blown swirls. As she followed the figure, the air felt as if it were getting damp; they were walking into an invisible cold fog. In the cells they passed now, there were slicks of slime on the floor, then lumps and mounds of greasy soil, then heaps of what looked like rotting flesh, viscous fluid trickling relentlessly towards the walkway. Eventually, she recognised limbs, torsos. A whole body, its face caved in, wet and oozing a substance she couldn’t identify. The wailing intensified.

More motionless corpses. Some she was not sure were dead. Then cells which held the animate.

Each cell in the row they had reached held a wretch of a person inside, some grasping at the bars, or pacing from one side to another, or hunched on the floor. Some clutched at each other, where they could reach, through the black bars, which left a slime of black on their thin clothes, their fingernails inflicting long thin welts on each other’s arms and faces.

Some were not alone in their cells, but shrank from their companions or pretended they were not there, though they could not fail to see them. Their eyes, in sorrowful, smudged faces, followed Kade as she stumbled after the robed figure. The floor was sticky now, but she did not look down.

At the end of a long corridor of barred cells, the air around her fell silent, and the figure stopped and gestured into a cell with only three sides.

‘But there is already someone in there,’ Kade said, her voice dulled and unechoing despite the cavernous space.

There was a child, who sat hunched on a stool in a patch of dim light in the centre of the cell. Her hair hung down to her lap, hiding her face.

‘Yes,’ said the figure, in a voice that seemed to absorb its own sound, ‘That is your task.’ And though her feet did not move, Kade found herself inside the cell, as if pushed there, and the fourth wall of bars slid into place behind her, grown up from the ground. The surrounding noises began again, rushing into her head as if bypassing her ears.

In the cell alongside Kade’s was a young man, his forehead bleeding from large scratches, his clothes torn and greyed. Chunks of his hair were on the ground at his feet. He clutched at his hair, his ears, trying to tear them from his skull with blackened nails. He muttered to himself, occasionally crying out words Kade did not understand, his eyes screwed shut. She could not tell if they were actually words or just escaping sound.

‘Why does he do that?’ Kade said.

The dark hood said in a voice like crumpling paper, ‘A million million of the living call his name all day from dawn to dawn, and his task is to hear them all. Soon you will hear them too, for he will share them with you.’

The hood turned away, and though the figure took only small steps, it was soon invisible against the rows of suffering. The cells closed together in a blink so the corridor between them was gone, and as far as Kade could see, there were cells in every direction. If she looked up, she saw only darkness beyond the spots of yellowish light that pinpointed the centre of each square.

Kade’s task, she understood without knowing how, was to count the hairs on the head of the child. She did not want to touch the child’s head, but knew she must. She parted the hair at random, searching for the girl’s face, but she had no face. Kade moved around the girl but she did not stir, but only sat, hunched, as though in penance for some dreadful deed like taking her brother’s toy. Her skin was clammy, her toes purple with a cold Kade did not feel, yet. There were long scratches on the girl’s lap and scabs on her knees, and her dirty fingernails dug into her thighs, leaving open sliced wounds that did not bleed. The stool she sat on appeared to have to grown out of her thin backside, or else she had sat upon it for so long it had become a part of her. Her hair was matted in places and smelled of dirt and decaying sweat and fear.

On the floor beside the stool was a comb made from bone, with several broken teeth. Kade picked it up and automatically began to pull it through the child’s hair. She was trying to be gentle, but found her movements jerky and stunted, like the movements made during sleep. Large tears dripped onto the girl’s hands as her head lurched from the pulling, but from no eyes Kade could find, and a thin wail exuded from her and echoed inside Kade’s head; she felt it more than heard it. She could taste it like copper. The hair was thick and coarse like that of an old woman, and the strands rolled under Kade’s fingertips like exposed wires.

“What did you do, child?’ Kade said.

In the cell opposite, an overweight man stood unsteadily in his own pool of light, his feet flattened from the effort of holding him upright. He turned very slowly to face her, and she saw that his chest was covered in vomit, whilst his hands were smeared with decayed food as if he had grabbed randomly at a passing ancient buffet.

‘Do you hear them?’ he said, his throat gargling.

‘Hear what?’ Kade asked.

The man bent his head down and spat on the floor. ‘You will hear them, soon,’ he said, his dark-rimmed eyes weeping caustic tears as he glared at her.

‘I’m Kade,’ she said.

‘No,’ he said, ‘you’re not.’ He turned away again.

Kade turned back to her task and began to count. She wedged the comb into the girl’s hair so she would know where she had started, but it fell onto the floor with a clatter. She tried to make a plait to mark her place, but the thick strands were too greasy and it fell away.

Her breath clouded and she felt the cold begin to creep into her. It hurt to move her fingers, but she knew she could not stop. There was a whispering all around her, from every direction except the one she faced, no matter which way she faced. She could not make out words; not yet. She felt the cell floor clinging at the layers of skin on the soles of her feet.

She tried to remember what she had done.

The Fantastic Writers Collective is a group of UK-based writers who enjoy telling stories about the weird and the wonderful.

Our debut anthology IS OUT NOW and available here.

Subscribe to Fantastic for updates, as well as flash fiction, poetry and musings about books, writing and the thing lurking under the bed.

Subscribe now

We also broke the Guinness World Record for the highest number of FWC members in the same place at one time, with all of us except Ell (who was missed!) in attendence.

If you missed the chance to get your hands on a copy of Running With the Pack, you can still order one from our Big Cartel site here.

We’re incredibly proud of our goregous anthology and after a short breather, we’re planning to regroup and work out how else to get copies into the hands of even more readers (while avoiding Amazon).

And we’ll be back this weekend with your usual newsletter, full of weird and wonderful stories from the Fantastic Writers Collective.

In the meantime, here are a few more pictures from the event:

The Fantastic Writers Collective is a group of UK-based writers who enjoy telling stories about the weird and the wonderful.

Our debut anthology IS OUT NOW and available here.

Subscribe to Fantastic for updates, as well as flash fiction, poetry and musings about books, writing and the thing lurking under the bed.

The night is dark and the way is twisting and treacherous - so here’s a handy guide to help you find your way.

Ticket reservations have now closed, but (FREE) tickets will still be available on the door.

The full address is: Bloomsbury Plaza, 12 Bloomsbury St, London WC1B 3QA, and the Google Maps link is here.

Don’t stray off the path and keep an eye out for wolves (but once you get there, absolutely do talk to strangers).

We can’t wait to see you there!

The Fantastic Writers Collective is a group of UK-based writers who enjoy telling stories about the weird and the wonderful.

Our debut anthology will be published on 15 February 2026.

You can pre-order a copy of the book here.

In the meantime, subscribe to Fantastic for updates, as well as flash fiction, poetry and musings about books, writing and the thing lurking under the bed.

This week, the first print run of Running With the Pack arrived on Richard’s doorstep - and as you can see, he lost no time in bringing them across the threshold and opening them up.

Here they are in all their glory:

(Music by Tom Janssen)

We can’t wait to share these with you in person at our launch event on 15 February, and to start shipping them out to those who have pre-ordered copies.

E-books and audioboks definitely have their place (and, for the record, audio books absolutely do count as reading) but sometimes there’s really nothing quite like holding a physical copy of a book in your hands, feeling the weight of the pages as they turn, the smell of the paper and the bindings and really take in the illustrations.

We might be biased, but we think Running With the Pack is the perfect example of this. Not only is it full of stories and poems which demand to be read with a cup of tea while curled up in your favourite chair, or within a duvet cocoon, as the February drizzle continues outside, it’s also bursting with beautifull illustrations clamouring to whisk you away to dark graveyards, castle banquets, backstage at the circus or the walls of Troy.

(As we’ve mentioned, each copy will come with a handmade bookmark featuring a recipe for biscuits that will go perfectly with your cup of tea.)

Similarly, authors themselves can also be extremely worthwhile creatures to encounter in person. If you’d like to do so, join us next Sunday, 15 February at 6.30pm for our official book launch at the Oxfam bookshop in Bloomsbury.

For more information and to reserve free tickets, click here.

If you can’t make it, but would still like to get your hands on a copy, you can order them here.

Here’s a little taster of what you can expect to find inside - if you’d like to know more about the stories and poems themselves, you can find all that in our ‘sneak peak’ post right here.

The Fantastic Writers Collective is a group of UK-based writers who enjoy telling stories about the weird and the wonderful.

Our debut anthology will be published on 15 February 2026.

In the meantime, subscribe to Fantastic for updates, as well as flash fiction, poetry and musings about books, writing and the thing lurking under the bed.

Here’s a little taster:

Join us for an evening of drinks, nibbles and fantastical tales, where you’ll have a chance to meet the FWC writers for real and get your hands on a copy of Running With the Pack.

You can book a free space at the event here or pre-order a copy of the book here.

And now, on to the main event!

Pelt

By Gillian Laker

Willem lifts a hand to his right shoulder, gently massages the muscles. He looks down at his mortar of coarsely ground lapis lazuli and reapplies himself. From the corner of his eye he sees that the Master has returned from the menagerie, smiling and triumphant. He has a heavy leather-bound sketchbook under one arm.

So, yet another hunting scene is being planned for their aristocratic patrons. There have been over a dozen painted in the last five years, with prey most various: lions, tigers, wild boar, even a crocodile and hippopotamus. The current work shows wolves – wolves and foxes.

Willem is not a city man. He was born in Bosland forest, two days’ walk from Antwerp. He rarely returns there. He saw many wolf hunts as a boy and has recently become valued as a source of specialist knowledge, stepping out from the background of anonymous apprentices who scale-up and transfer preparatory drawings, maintain the Master’s palette, even complete drapery and secondary figures.

Willem has been pressed for hunting stories. They always end the same way, are expected to do so. He looks at the latest painting. It’s almost finished. Maybe some highlights needed for the eyes of the furthest dog who is all darkness and shadow.

The animals are very lifelike. Willem most admires the horses, with their ringleted manes and tails, their chess-piece heads and necks. But the hunt itself does not resemble the ones he’s witnessed. There are no messy streaks from evacuated bowels. No blood soaks the rippling pelts. Here vermilion is used only as tasteful framing: the mounted lady’s skirt on the right; the man’s broad back on the left.

Willem looks at the wolves, shivers, finds his own upper lip curling in response to canine snarls. Painting, he has come to realise, is much like the hunt. Both fight for control, a trouncing of wildness, screwing everything down to a pitiless centre of entertainment. Overtaken by a sudden desire to rend and tear, he shifts his gaze to the deep ultramarine pigment to calm himself.

No, he does not return home very often. But a month ago he was given leave to attend his father’s funeral, travelling out through mud and driving rain, back in good weather under a full moon. He lifts his hand again to his shoulder, presses fingers through old linen, traces the outline of a bite, a few stiff hairs.

Gillian Laker is a poet and short story writer with an interest in classical myth, fairy tales and the uncanny landscape. She is a former Canterbury Festival Poet of the Year and her sequence of dark fairy tales formed part of a multi-media exhibition to celebrate the bicentennial of Hans Christian Anderson in Odense, Denmark. Her illustrated poetry collection, Curious Voices, was published by Cinnamon Press and spoke from the viewpoint of items held in the cabinets of curiosity at the Beaney House of Art and Knowledge. She has just completed her first novel, Veldenstein, a work of historical fiction running over two timelines and buffered by retellings of Grimms’ fairy tales.

The Fantastic Writers Collective is a group of UK-based writers who enjoy telling stories about the weird and the wonderful.

Our debut anthology will be published on 15 February 2026.

You can book a free space at the event here or pre-order a copy of the book here.

In the meantime, subscribe to Fantastic for updates, as well as flash fiction, poetry and musings about books, writing and the thing lurking under the bed.

But before we get to that, here’s your regular reminder that our debut anthology Running With the Pack will be launching on 15 February the Oxfam Bookshop in Bloomsbury.

Join us for an evening of drinks, nibbles and fantastical tales, where you’ll have a chance to meet the FWC writers for real and get your hands on a copy of Running With the Pack.

You can book a free space at the event here or pre-order a copy of the book here.

And now on to the main event!

Meet the writers: Maria Sanger

Maria Sanger holds an MA in Creative Writing and is currently at Anglia Ruskin University in the final year of a PhD. Her collection of short fiction, The Ridge and The Chessmen, melds history and fantasy and is inspired by the Lewis Chessmen, discovered on the Isle of Lewis in 1831. Several short stories have been published online and a selection of extracts in Vanessa Gebbie’s Fifty-One and a Half Exercises: Games and Ideas for Writers. Maria lives in Ely, Cambridgeshire and loves reading anything uncanny, weird, strange happenings in the landscape...or inanimate objects coming to life.

My favourite childhood book was…

Well, I loved Robert Louis Stevenson’s A Child’s Garden of Verse, which I used to dip into when I was off school with bronchitis, and Louis Untermeyer’s The Golden Treasury of Poetry, because of its illustrations. All the kids at my junior school used to learn a poem from memory for the annual poetry competition. My favourite was one by Hilaire Belloc, and although it seemed a good idea at the time, in reality its long title became a bit of a mouthful to recite with a brace at ten years old: ‘George, Who played with a Dangerous Toy and Suffered a Catastrophe of Considerable Dimensions’. I liked the illustration of the teetering house with lots of chimneys.

My favourite book…

is any book I’m currently reading and which I can’t put down. Recently that has included Michelle Paver’s Thin Air, Susan Cooper’s The Dark is Rising, Elizabeth Hand’s A Haunting on the Hill and the short anthology of stories edited by Elizabeth Dearnley, Deadly Dolls: Midnight Tales of Uncanny Playthings.

My earliest memory is…

Weird. At around five years old and an only child, I was a bit of a dreamer. We lived in South-East London and my mum would get me to run small errands while we were out shopping. One morning we’d walked to our local shops and Mum asked me to collect her shoes from Bryants, the shoe repairer, while she went to the butchers.

‘Don’t dawdle,’ she said, planting a handful of loose change in my palm. ‘That’s the exact amount. Mind you give it all to Mrs Bryant. If you’re out first, wait here. I shan’t be long.’

I quickly handed over the change, picked up the brown paper bag of shoes and scurried back outside. Mum was still queuing in the butchers and I waited, probably counting the passing red cars or jumping between cracks in the pavement, all the while clutching the brown paper bag under my arm.

It wasn’t long before I caught a glimpse of long dark hair and the sound of heeled shoes – the brown bag under my arm was probably very crumpled by this stage. Mum didn’t offer to carry the shoes like she sometimes did. We walked up the road, past Safeways, until we were almost under the motorway flyover (that looked like a giant’s arm to me) and then we climbed the slope and continued along the footpath alongside the A2, past the long row of giant tooth picks that ran along the backs of gardens. You couldn’t see the motorway through the barriers – you’d just be deafened by lorries and screeching wheels. All the time I chatted on, thinking that mum seemed quieter than usual.

We reached the fork that would take us either left up an alleyway or straight on alongside the motorway. Home was left up the alleyway, but today she walked straight ahead.

‘That’s not the way home. We don’t normally walk that way,’ I said. All this time I’d been clinging onto the arm of a pram. Pram? That was the first moment that I had really looked at it. But we didn’t have a pram...I looked up at the dark hair and withdrew my hand. ‘You’re not my mum.’ I cried out.

Feeling very wobbly and upset, I ran to our road and knocked at a neighbour’s door. Angela offered me a glass of lemonade with a straw and a finger of shortbread. Not long after, mum hurried up the road, beside herself that something had happened to me. Years later, I still find it a surreal experience. I often wonder why the woman didn’t speak or send me back to my mother. More worrying to me now is why I didn’t notice the pram.

The first story I remember hearing was…

Enid Blyton’s The Magic Faraway Tree. Our junior school teacher, Mrs Amey, read it to us. I loved the idea of magic and enchantment and dreamed of these magical lands that circled the top of the tree. I longed to escape in one of them.

The first artwork I remember seeing is…

The multicoloured picture of a giraffe in a children’s ward. I was six, under the influence of an anaesthetic and about to have my adenoids out. As I stared at the picture, the yellow giraffe started to break up into lots of small pieces as though it was about to explode. I had to look away because the glaring colours started to bleed into one another.

My biggest inspiration…

My parents. My dad sadly died in 2021. All those castles we climbed in Wales, going to archaeological sites, and museums, I wish I could wave a wand and go back in time to relive those moments.

Notebook or computer?

I like free writing in a notebook because there’s something satisfying in the way the pen or pencil flows across the page. I used to aim for neatness, but now accept that my writing will end up in a messy scrawl. That’s okay – I reshape later on the computer.

My favourite author…

It’s super impossible to just pick one. The ones that come to mind are Margaret Atwood, Shirley Jackson, Donna Tartt, Elizabeth Hand, David Mitchell, and Robert Aickman.

My bucket list item is…

to go to Venice.

I’m happiest with…

Simple pleasures of reading, writing, and discovering new fictional worlds; playing or listening to music. Enjoying a meal and wine with friends and family. Or roaming under the wide starry skies of the Cambridgeshire Fens.

The Fantastic Writers Collective is a group of UK-based writers who enjoy telling stories about the weird and the wonderful.

Our debut anthology will be published on 15 February 2026.

You can book a free space at the event here or pre-order a copy of the book here.

In the meantime, subscribe to Fantastic for updates, as well as flash fiction, poetry and musings about books, writing and the thing lurking under the bed.

Share

You are cordially invited to the official launch of Running With the Pack, the debut anthology of the Fantastic Writers Collective.

We are howling with delight to finally be able to share the details of the event with you.

Our beautifully illustrated collection of stories and poems will be unleashed upon the world on 15 February from 6.30pm to 8pm at the Oxfam Bookshop, on Bloomsbury Street, London WC1B 3QA.

Follow a retreating figure down the darkened London streets, until you come to a shop with all the lights on and otherworldly voices chattering within. Slip inside, comb through dusty tomes of arcane knowledge, then gather around the fire*. Let us tell you tales of strange worlds and parts of ours that become less familiar the closer you look.

There will be nibbles, drinks, readings, and an opportunity to meet the pack - and of course, to purchase your very own copy of Running With the Pack.

Entry is absolutely free, but it would help us gauge the numbers if you could book a ticket through Eventbrite here.

We can’t wait to welcome you.

*Not an actual fire.

But don’t take our word for it! Instead take the word of the Ivor Novello-winning author of a 2022 Sunday Times Book of the Year, Zoe Gilbert. It was Zoe’s course on ‘Fantastic literature’ which brought the Fantastic Writers Collective together in the first place, and she was kind enough to write a foreword for the anthology.

To read the whole thing, you’ll have to buy a copy (pre-orders available here), but here’s a taster of what Zoe had to say, along with one of Richard’s illustrations (to see how he created it, check out the video in last’s week’s newsletter).

From the foreword to Running With the Pack

By Zoe Gilbert

Filling a book with fantastical short stories and poems and glorious pictures is an extremely risky thing to do in the world as it is right now, because while these authors might revel in taking risks, sadly, at the time of writing, the same cannot be said for our publishing industry. In fact, ‘risk-averse’ is probably the expression currently popping up most often – between sighs and less polite phrases – as despondent writers, agents and editors compare notes. I wish it weren’t so, and there’s no single villain to blame. But it is partly in response to this sad state of affairs that these bold authors took another risk and made a book themselves. And made it beautiful and only available to you via the non-vampiric variety of booksellers. These gestures against despondency matter greatly right now, and give me hope. Also, this book might not have been such a stunning creature had the publishing industry got its hands on it. A fantastic beast indeed.

‘The story is, itself, a spell.’ This quote from Ursula K Le Guin is such a goodie. It could be a motto for all short story writers and readers, but especially fantastically-inclined ones. Spells intend to change reality.

The stories you are about to read [in Running With the Pack] are indeed spells, and they will change your relationship with the world, sometimes temporarily, sometimes permanently. Things will become strange. For a time, work will stop; transport cease; essential services fail. For a moment, the real, strange reality will be with you, and you won’t want to be anywhere else.

@ZoeGilbert is an author, creative writing teacher and mentor specialising in short and long form fiction. Her first novel, Folk (Bloomsbury, 2018), was shortlisted for the Dylan Thomas Prize and adapted for BBC radio. Her second, Mischief Acts (Bloomsbury, 2022), was a Sunday Times Book of the Year. Both draw on the folklore and landscape of Britian to create alternative worlds. Her stories have been published in anthologies and journals around the world, been broadcast on BBC Radio 4, and have won prizes including the Costa Short Story Award. She is a writer and presenter on nature podcast As The Season Turns, shortlisted for the British Podcast Awards 2023, and she has written a libretto based on Folk, with the resulting song cycle receiving its world premiere in 2024. She has many years’ experience in mentoring writers, and is co-director of .

The Fantastic Writers Collective is a group of UK-based writers who enjoy telling stories about the weird and the wonderful.

Our debut anthology will be published on 15 Feburary 2026. In the meantime, subscribe to Fantastic for updates, as well as flash fiction, poetry and musings about books, writing and the thing lurking under the bed.

Subscribe now

The anthology will officially launch on 15 February (more details to follow very soon!), but if you can’t make it to the launch party, or you can’t wait that long to secure your copy, you can pre-order one now at fantasticwriterscollective.bigcartel.com.

In the meantime, here’s Richard, demonstrating the fiddly, painstaking but ultimately very satisfying process of printmaking. The image he’s creating in this video will sit alongside the foreword in the anthology, kindly written by the lovely Zoe Gilbert.

(Sound on to hear the backing track, something Richard describes as “freaky medieval techno” — what’s not to love?)

The find out more about what will in the anthology, check out last week’s post, available here.

The Fantastic Writers Collective is a group of UK-based writers who enjoy telling stories about the weird and the wonderful.

Our debut anthology will be published in Feburary 2026. In the meantime, subscribe to Fantastic for updates, as well as flash fiction, poetry and musings about books, writing and the thing lurking under the bed.

We might have mentioned (you know, once or twice) that we’ve got an anthology coming out in February. We’re officially launching Running With the Pack on 15 February at the Oxfam Bookshop in Bloomsbury — more details to follow — but before we do, we thought we’d better give you a sneak peek at what’s actually inside it.

As you’ll probably know, here at FWC, we’re big fans of stories that are a bit, for want of a better word, strange. The tales we tell often blend folklore, fantasy, magical realism, horror and the uncanny, and bound together in one beautifully illustrated hardback volume, they create a world where magic whispers from the most mundane moments of ordinary life and nothing is really as it seems.

So, without too many spoilers, what’s actually in this anthology then?

The short answer is, quite a lot of wolves. This was something that came about entirely by accident — famously, wolves tend to band together, and we found a surprising number of them had congregated in the stories FWC members had put forward for this project. After much howling and gnashing of teeth (and that’s just our WhatsApp group chat), they were kind enough to suggest the anthology’s title to us.

We’ve got a wolf listening from the shadows as a child sets out to visit her grandmother in the poem ‘What the Wolf Heard’ by Gillian Laker and a lupine encounter at a Halloween party in Brixton which leads to a confrontation where it isn’t clear who is truly the predator (‘The Gentlest of Wolves’ by Emma Dee). There’s also a pack of wolves descending on a medieval king mid-banquet — although between the king’s moping niece, doltish ambassadors and terrifying sister-in-law, the wolves are the least of his problems (‘The Many Trials of King Pandion’ by Richard Butterworth).

Foxes are slightly less plentiful, but nonetheless do make an appearance in Margot Wilson’s ‘The Grandparents’ Guide to Ruling the Country’, where multiple generations of a family try to make sense of the country’s surprisingly transformative politics.

Familiar figures from folklore and mythology dart between the pages of this anthology, both in the gorgeous illustrations by Richard Butterworth, and in the stories. They turn up in strange places or are revealed from unusual angles — from Robin Hood taking on a new guise in Margot’s ‘Robina and the Sisterhood’ to the Children of Lir landing in an immigration detention centre in Rebecca K Cooney’s ‘Lir’s Children’. The story of Troy is told by the river which ran beside it and bore witness to its rise and fall in ‘Scamander - The River’s Story’, by Gillian. Elsewhere, in the poem ‘The Erl King’ (also by Gillian), the sinister figure continues to stalk youngsters through the woods and beyond, and a small red stranger offers a frustrated circus skills performer a deal in Ell Wright’s ‘The Diabolist’.

But that doesn’t mean we’re stuck in the past. Several tales take a look into possible futures - including a not-too-distant one where the British establishment cheerfully fails to deal with an alien invasion (Margot’s ‘It Was Four O’Clock on a Windy Monday), and Louisa Todd’s nightmarish vision of a world consumed by war in ‘Fodder’. In the more far-flung future of Gillian’s Cassandra, an unusual narrator with an oddly familiar voice wants to tell you all about her life. The future is notoriously difficult to predict, and in Emma’s story ‘Whether the Weather’ the hassle of worrying about the course your life might take is removed by a watch which tells you what’s due to happen next. What could possibly go wrong?

This is a collection of stories and poems where dreams can hide in birds’ eggs (‘The Lark’s Egg’, by Richard) and magic seeps into domestic spaces. In ‘Rituals’ by Helen Harjak, a woman caught in an unsatisfying affair stirs a pot of probably harmless jam while reflecting on whether teenage jealousies which spilled into an attempt at witchcraft really had a lasting effect. Similarly, in Rebecca’s poem ‘Selkie’, the narrator cleans up after a flatmate who is shedding parts of herself under the glare of an emotionally abusive boyfriend and in Maria Sanger’s ‘The Trunk’, a nun is haunted by her memories after being reunited with a box of childhood belongings. Meanwhile, in Maria’s ‘The Honey Trap’, a young girl longingly contemplates her teacher’s collection of butterflies while trying to teach her snitching friend a lesson, and in Louisa’s ‘My Daughter’s Pocket’, a mother listens to her daughter recount her day at school, becoming increasingly aware that something isn’t quite right.

And of course, we’ve got to mention Richard’s incredible illustrations — each written piece in this collection is illuminated with clever, thoughtful, tailored images, all handcrafted by Richard in a variety of styles. Quite simply, his illustrations make this book beautiful to behold, before you even get to the words.

It turns out, it’s really tricky to convey the full scope of the weird and wonderful stories contained in Running With the Pack without giving away too much or ruining carefully constructed twists - but hopefully that has given you a taste. If any of this has made you ask ‘I’m sorry, what?’, rest assured, we’re often asking ourselves the same question, and if it’s made you curious to find out more, well, good. Curiosity is, as many stories will tell you, a dangerous thing, but in this case we urge you to indulge it. Take the overgrown path that promises adventure, open that tantalising box, answer the howling voice that calls to you under a full moon — and when the time comes, crack open a copy of Running With The Pack and delve into our strange and fantastical world.

In the meantime, make sure you’re subscribed to receive updates on the launch event and information on how to buy a copy, and tell your friends!

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The Fantastic Writers Collective is a group of UK-based writers who enjoy telling stories about the weird and the wonderful.

Our debut anthology will be published in Feburary 2026. In the meantime, subscribe to Fantastic for updates, as well as flash fiction, poetry and musings about books, writing and the thing lurking under the bed.

Subscribe now

These days doing anything that doesn’t involve doom-scrolling or mass consumption of cheap rubbish can be classed as a revolutionary act. We’re not kidding — people post reels on Instagram asserting that going for a walk in the woods without headphones on is an act of defiance.

We of the Fantastic Writers Collective don’t feel like we’re being revolutionary, we just want to tell some stories and let you, our audience, read them in a really pleasing book - a book that says ‘we took some effort and care making this, in the hope that you might take some pleasure reading it’. That book is Running with the Pack, an illustrated 140-page collection of strange prose and spooky poetry by nine authors, which will launch in February 2026.

But we do have some rules for how we’re going to sell Running with the Pack (hopefully to you). We’ll leave you to decide whether they’re revolutionary or not.

1. It’s a book. A real book, made out of paper and card. You cannot scroll past it because there will not be an e-version of it. E-books do have their place (and we’re not ruling out an audiobook version in the future). But for this book, you will need to sit down in a comfy chair, put it in your lap and experience the physicality of it. Study the detail of Richard’s intricate illustrations, which can really only be done justice in printed form. Maybe have a mug or glass of something warming while reading it, and we strongly recommend a plate of biscuits (homemade by preference — if you don’t know how to make biscuits see point 5).

2. It’s not for sale on Amazon. Nope. Never. Their tax affairs are abysmal, they’re ruining the high-street and the boss’s rocket looks like a willy. So nope, not on Amazon.

3. We will sell it at book fairs, where you get to meet us in person, and we’ll smile at you and sign it for you if you want. However we’ll try and be empathetic and not smile at you too much if you’re obviously having a bad day.

4. We will sell it through independently owned bookshops run by people who love books, and we’ll ask them to smile at you when you buy it (although obviously we can’t guarantee this). It will not be for sale in mega-chain bookshops that are happy to pass-off AI generated plagiarism as ‘books’.

5. We will sell it through our online shop, and we will pack your copy by hand and include a unique printed bookmark, a recipe for biscuits and a hand-written thank you.

“Why do it this way?” you ask. Well, because we had fun writing and making this book and we’re going to have fun selling it too. “But you won’t sell that many!” you comment (possibly). No, and we don’t care. This project was never about making money, and none of us are planning to give up the day job on the back of this. Even if we jumped through all the publishing industry hoops - spent months trying to get an agent, who may or may not then sell it to a publisher, have it sliced up by an editor to make it more commercial, then e-bludgeoned to death to make it Kindle-friendly, and then watch it sell a few thousand copies through retail outlets run by people we think are psychopaths - we still wouldn’t be giving up the day jobs. The publishing industry doesn’t pay authors enough to give up the day jobs.

We are, of course, immensely privileged to be in this position; to have the spare time and spare cash to embark on this project. We know that there are many writers and artists out there that don’t have these privileges. We also know that in previous times Running with the Pack would most likely be derided as vanity publishing by a bunch of dilettantes.

But here are a few observations: firstly, when one of our nextdoor neighbours, who worked in a literary agency, found out we were writing a book she said ‘are you famous?’, then ‘is it a cookbook?’, then having had a negative reply to both of these questions said ‘well, you won’t get it published then’. Shortly after this conversation she left the agency and the publishing industry in disgust. One of the many working titles we had for Running with the Pack was A Cookbook by a Celebrity (How to Cook a Wolf already having been bagged by MFK Fisher).

Unbound, which might have have been the kind of place we could go to get this sort of project published, went in adminstration earlier this year. At time of writing, many of its authors were owed money.

One of our group self-published a memoir five years ago. It wasn’t supposed to be a commercial thing — its main motivation was as a present for a friend who was painfully bereaved. It has sat on Amazon for four years now, sold one copy and made the author a profit of 11 pence, and has probably been fed without permision into an AI corpus. Admittedly, the author didn’t put any real effort into marketing it, but they have been busy doing other more important things; like writing, getting an MA, supporting a family and having a job. They don’t want to spend the short time they have in this world playing algorithm games with a multi-billionaire’s world domination website.

So the question remains for us, why bother doing the publishing industry thing when we don’t have to? And even if we did, we’d have to sell what’s left of our souls to Amazon, only to make marginally more money than we would have done otherwise?

We know our ‘revolutionary act of defiance’ will not overturn this increasingly ghastly world order. But maybe we might get people thinking about why this society doesn’t pay creatives enough that they can support themselves, and about all the wonderful works of art that never happen because the people who could have made them were too busy and knackered with the side hustle that pays their mortgage. And who knows, from there, maybe something might change?

Mostly though, we’d like for you to read our stories, eat some biscuits and come for a walk in our deep dark woods. We recommend you stay defiant and leave the headphones at home — all the better to hear the footsteps behind you and see the eyes watching you from the undergrowth. Things are about to get weird.

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The Fantastic Writers Collective is a group of UK-based writers who enjoy telling stories about the weird and the wonderful.

Our debut anthology will be published in Feburary 2026. In the meantime, subscribe to Fantastic for updates, as well as flash fiction, poetry and musings about books, writing and the thing lurking under the bed.

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Little Chance of a Westerley

By Gillian Laker

She always wore a silver charm on a chain about her neck; a curved and indistinct figure, part seahorse, part fish hook. He once asked who had given it to her, and when. She’d stared, unblinking, with those strange black eyes that swallowed all reflections, ‘No-one,’ she’d said, ‘it’s always been mine.’ Afterwards, she grew wary of his planned surprises, their hinged boxes, furbelows and pink thrift.

He reaches to touch his chest where the charm now hangs beneath his shirt, presses its coldness into the smooth skin above his heart. He wonders briefly if the shape might be an anchor but, all in all, that seems unlikely.

Throughout the endless days of midsummer, when the sun and moon roll along the horizon, he walks for hours. There is little chance of a westerley at this time of year – little chance of a rough and raging tempest like the one that delivered her to him. He walks to the next headland and the next, scans the cloudless sky hoping for anvils.

He walks the littoral, feeling the suck and give, picking up claw-footed driftwood or sea glass, tumbled smooth, its flat tablets ranging from white to pale green to indigo. Sometimes his youngest son walks beside him, huff-bubbling a lost lullaby, sifting dull pebbles for the best agate.

Under the kitchen window sits the scratched cabinet of specimen drawers with the boy’s mother’s collection of mermaid’s purse, kelp and bladderwrack, all laid out in subtle gradations of size and colour. There are folded notes and annotations in the batter-spattered cookery book beside the range. He flicks through its pages. The best way to souse a freshly caught mackerel. How to make an authentic Cornish stew. These are recipes he does not attempt. They are instructions that have become archaic and unreadable, runes from a former life, tales from an element that has reclaimed her.

Some nights, when the house is full of steady breathing, he crouches beside the old steamer trunk. He cannot bear to lift the lid, to reacquaint himself with the emptiness within. Instead he rubs his face raw across the dinted and whorled surface. He can still smell both sweet and salt through its planks.

On sunny afternoons he forces himself to wait on a grey-weathered seat beside the door. The onshore breezes are briny iodine. Out in the bay the slick heads of his children surface in rhythms he cannot unpick from this distance. They seem to stay too long below the surface for his or their comfort, and he struggles to suppress the panic that they might run out of air. It still terrifies him each time they step over the shingle and into the waves. He imagines them unable to outswim enchantment, lured into riptides by the seals’ song.

Despite all this, and while the light is constant, he somehow feels certain of their return.

Under the felt of winter darkness it is a different matter. Then the arctic nights carry the call of whale and walrus and the shore ice crisps and groans. He keeps his sons close, smokes herring indoors if he has to, lets the house grow fusty.

During his deepest dreams he floats in a lifeless ocean – glass-clear and beautiful. When he lowers his head into the water, he can make out the wrecks of all the various crafts launched to master this realm: the gouged trunks of the first hunter-gatherers; the sneering dragon heads of long boats; a gilded Spanish galleon blown north from some storm-tossed Armada. He searches the seabed and finds a small ketch with her name carved into its keel. There are beams of pale honey light spilling through its splintered deck, black eyes in a flexing and sinuous shadow.

He drops coins to sound the depths, then spoons, keys, a wedding ring.

Gillian Laker is a poet and short story writer with an interest in classical myth, fairy tales and the uncanny landscape. She is a former Canterbury Festival Poet of the Year and her sequence of dark fairy tales formed part of a multi-media exhibition to celebrate the bicentennial of Hans Christian Anderson in Odense, Denmark. Her illustrated poetry collection, Curious Voices, was published by Cinnamon Press and spoke from the viewpoint of items held in the cabinets of curiosity at the Beaney House of Art and Knowledge. She has just completed her first novel, Veldenstein, a work of historical fiction running over two timelines and buffered by retellings of Grimms’ fairy tales.

The Fantastic Writers Collective is a group of UK-based writers who enjoy telling stories about the weird and the wonderful.

Our debut anthology will be published in early 2026. In the meantime, subscribe to Fantastic for updates, as well as flash fiction, poetry and musings about books, writing and the thing lurking under the bed.

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Margot Wilson’s short stories have appeared on the websites of Dear Damsels, Aayoo Magazine and the Anansi archive. She is a Francophile and a Liberal Democrat activist and spends a lot of time with her children and grandchildren, who live round the corner from her home in South London.

I was born and bred in…

Yorkshire, in the beautiful town of Harrogate before the NHS. My grandfather paid for the nursing home as he wanted to make sure that, had I been a boy, I would have been able to play cricket for Yorkshire but my parents were living in Retford at the time.

My father’s family have lived in the Calder valley since time immemorial. My mother’s family moved into Rotherham in the nineteenth century from Shropshire, Nottingham, Birmingham and Scotland.

My earliest memory is…

listening to our neighbour in Retford talking to my mother. She said her feelings were hurt. I gazed up at her and saw that the roof of her mouth was orange and blue. I concluded that this was because it was hurt and so believed for some time that that was where people kept their feelings.

The first story I remember hearing or reading is…

Listen with Mother on the radio, followed by Andy Pandy on the television.

My grandparents told lots of stories about the war. Most of them comic. My grandfather heard the siren and jumped out of bed to carry out his duties in the Home Guard and went skidding along the polished floor on the fox skin rug. My grandmother complained about the heat in the cupboard under the stairs, where they were sheltering, until it was discovered that she was wearing her fur coat. A woman in Leeds would not borrow the stirrup pump from her neighbour to put out the fires because she wasn’t speaking to that neighbour.

My spookiest experience was…

when I was ten years old. My seven-year-old brother and I were sleeping in the twin beds in the bedroom in my grandparents’ house where my great grandparents had spent their final days. My great grandfather had died not long before.

I had fond memories of him telling me, when I was three, that he was lying on the couch because he had ‘old monia’ not new monia. He had a pump that helped him to breathe, after his years down the mine and in the First World War, where he had lost a piano playing finger. He would squeeze a rubber bulb at the bottom of the pump by hand and a glass tube led into his mouth.

When he lay in bed in his final illness, he would give me half a crown every time I went in to see him. I was grateful because I was saving up for a poodle.

My brother had done that thing where he rolled his head from side to side on the pillow and fallen asleep.

The door creaked open.

I heard the rasp of the breathing pump.

I pulled the sheet over my head so I did not see anything but I heard the ghostly sound moving across the room as though he had come to look at us, his great grandchildren, one last time.

The first story I remember telling or writing is…

The History of Marmaduke MacGinger, a cat who lived in Aberdeen. I took the eleven plus in the morning and then came home and wrote that story.

My favourite folkloric creature is…

The Croglin Vampire. This story was told to me in the nineteen sixties by Mrs Parkin, a friend of my mother, whose family had once owned Croglin Low Hall, formerly known as Croglin Grange.

Croglin is a remote village in the Eden Valley. My parents had a house nearby.

My favourite holiday destination is…

France. I begin to feel at home as soon as I set foot on French soil and there is never an end to what there is to discover.

My favourite author is…

Elsa Triolet who was born in Russia and started to write fiction at the suggestion of Maxim Gorky. After moving to Paris via Tahiti and then Berlin, she met poet and surrealist, Louis Aragon, they .married just before the war. After ten years living in France, during which she had produced extraordinary jewellery for the Haute Couture fashion houses, she began to write fiction in French. She was a heroine of the French Resistance and the first woman to win the Prix Goncourt. Birkbeck let me choose her for my MA dissertation in 2000 and I got to see her manuscripts in the Bibliothėque Nationale.

My favourite book is…

‘Roses à crédit’ by Elsa Triolet.

I’m happiest when…

I’m listening to my family talking to each other, or hearing my two elder grandsons play the piano.

My signature dish is…

Yorkshire pudding or spaghetti bolognese.

Notepad or computer?

I like writing on the computer, probably because you can delete things so easily.

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The Fantastic Writers Collective is a group of UK-based writers who enjoy telling stories about the weird and the wonderful.

Our debut anthology will be published in early 2026. In the meantime, subscribe to Fantastic for updates, as well as flash fiction, poetry and musings about books, writing and the thing lurking under the bed.

This week, Gill talks to us about things to do with red mullet, underappreciated characters from the Mabinogi and being in love with Snufkin from the Moomins.

Gillian Laker is a poet and short story writer with an interest in classical myth, fairy tales and the uncanny landscape. She is a former Canterbury Festival Poet of the Year and her sequence of dark fairy tales formed part of a multi-media exhibition to celebrate the bicentennial of Hans Christian Anderson in Odense, Denmark. Her illustrated poetry collection, Curious Voices, was published by Cinnamon Press and spoke from the viewpoint of items held in the cabinets of curiosity at the Beaney House of Art and Knowledge. She has just completed her first novel, Veldenstein, a work of historical fiction running over two timelines and buffered by retellings of Grimms’ fairy tales.

My earliest memory is…

I’m being washed in the kitchen sink. A shiny, pink body frothed in soap-scum stretches away below my neck and seems to belong elsewhere. Beyond the window a full nursery moon has started to rise and is enormous – or this may be another moon from another time without its own story. Outside is a motorcycle which I know is called James not Vincent.

Suddenly there’s a trickle of red over the tank, a flicker of yellow. A glorious noise roars through the windowpane. It’s everything I could have hoped for. People are running back to the outside privy to find buckets – neighbours and strangers are pushing through the side gate, shouting and passing bowls.

Last time I wanted to throw a book across the room was…

I’ve actually done this. I was reading The Vorrh by the late Brian Catling (sculptor, poet, novelist, film-maker and performance artist). The experience was quite intense, more like holding a brain than a book (I’d even weighed the book and worked out that it was the equivalent of the brain of a six month-old modern human or a newborn Australopithecus infant). The main protagonist in the book was a cyclops and Catling had devoted many pages to show how a fused brain would think differently, indeed better, than our split hemispherical brains. Then, towards the end, he lost his nerve and granted his cyclops a second eye. I felt so let down.

My fictional character crush is…

My first and last love is Snufkin from the Moomintroll books. He is going to rescue me from the Groke, after which we will run away together and live in a hut in the Finnish forest. He has agreed to smoke outside.

My signature dish is…

Red mullet cut into chunks, chopped parsley, chopped red chili pepper, skinned fresh tomatoes, sliced garlic, the best olive oil, linguine, squeeze of lemon and black pepper to serve. It’s extremely quick and easy to make as long as you can get your hands on the red mullet.

My favourite book is…

Ulverton by Adam Thorpe – I was blown away when I first read this. It is much more common now to show the influence of place or a natural phenomenon on a long stretch of history, with many voices and genres combining into a kind of chorus. Zoe Gilbert does this with Mischief Acts. Sarah Hall does it with Helm. But Ulverton was, I think, the first and hardest to beat.

My favourite author…

This is difficult because I have read so many authors for the first time in the last five years and I won’t be sure if any of them will displace earlier favourites without rereading those too. So, I’ll choose an old obsession, Penelope Fitzgerald, and a new (to me), Elif Shafak. As I’m slightly embarrassed that they are both women, I’ll throw in two male authors for balance, Robertson Davies and Colm Tóibín.

My favourite artist is…

Anselm Kiefer – my Phd academic piece was, in part, the charting of his influence on my first novel, Veldenstein.

My favourite fairytale/mythological/folkloric creature is…

I’ve always felt great sympathy for Blodeuwedd from the fourth branch of the Mabinogi. She is magically created from flowers by the wizards Gwydion and Math and given to Lleu Llaw Gyffes, who has been cursed and is unable to marry a human woman. However, Blodeuwedd falls in love with Gronw Pebr and plots to kill her husband. When the plot is discovered, Blodeuwedd is transformed into an owl and shunned by all the other birds. The story is retold in Alan Garner’s The Owl Service.

Notebook or computer?

Notebook, then computer.

My go-to cure for writer’s block?

Sitting by the local river or, if in a hurry, standing under the shower with the water bouncing off my forehead.

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As mentioned above, Rebecca’s been getting some work done on her work-in-progress hoping to attract ghosts by hanging around in an old house, namely The Gladstone Library in north Wales. It’s a library with a hotel, restaurant and very good scones.

She’s having a lovely time - the food is great, everyone is very friendly, she’s getting to hang out in a library that is the perfect cross between the one from Buffy the Vampire Slayer and the one from Beauty and the Beast. AND she’s actually getting some work done. Here’s some actual footage from her trip:

She highly recommends it.

The Fantastic Writers Collective is a group of UK-based writers who enjoy telling stories about the weird and the wonderful.

Our debut anthology will be published in early 2026. In the meantime, subscribe to Fantastic for updates, as well as flash fiction, poetry and musings about books, writing and the thing lurking under the bed.

Graduation Day

by Richard Butterworth

A sternly worded email from the Head of School had been circulated, condemning last year’s turnout of staff on Graduation Day. It is the duty of all staff, it asserted, to attend Graduation Day and help our students celebrate the great day when their degrees are granted to them. A wave of frustrated grumbling rolled through our windowless offices. We had better things to do than put on fancy dress, parade on stage and smile patronisingly on the students whose main academic achievement was managing three whole years without getting caught using an online essay farm. The wave of muttering crested into the Head of School’s office, and, being a skilled surfer of dissatisfaction, he immediately released another dispatch saying that he wasn’t joking, and anyone not at Graduation would have to report to him and explain their absence. All the usual excuses; hundreds of exam papers to mark, international journals to edit, mass student disciplinary hearings to attend, weeping PhD candidates to be comforted (though not in a manner that could be misconstrued as sexual), job interviews with higher ranking institutions, and so on… none of these excuses counted. Furthermore the only drugs permissible on the day were those that could be obtained in reputable chemist shops; prescription, over-the-counter or herbal. There was to be no repeat of 2017 and the resultant unflattering reports in local newspapers.

We mill around in a corridor in our stupid hats and gowns looking bored and put upon. A Reader in Post-Structural Dialogue Analysis makes her annual complaint about the inherent sexism in awarding degrees called Bachelors, while an eminent Professor in Inorganic Chemistry does his annual Batman impression with his robes. The Head of School makes a point of rounding up all those wearing the colours of his Oxford college and speaking only to them. Cheap fizzy piss in cheap plastic flutes is passed round by a waitress who we all try not to notice is one of our graduates from four years ago.

We file in a side door and onto stage in a ludicrous fancy dress conga line, blinking in the spotlights and the great cavernous space before us. The eminent Professor of Inorganic Chemistry, who has only three months to retirement and has already given his life over to purely hedonistic pleasures, spots a microphone stand, breaks the conga line and announces “Hello Wembley!” to the massive audience and strikes a chord on his air guitar before anyone has chance to switch the microphone off. The audience rumble in happy laughter.

He isn’t joking. This is Wembley. The conference auditorium, not the stadium, but a massive echoing space nonetheless, and the only building in North London that can accommodate our thousands and thousands of graduates and their thousands and thousands of parents at once.

Once we are all seated the lights shift onto the Vice Chancellor who has taken to the dais at the front of the stage.

“Hello Wembley!” he announces. “I’ve always wanted to say that!” Another distant rumble of laughter.

“I won’t keep you long,” he starts before launching into an interminable speech, which seems to be mostly culled from Instagram inspirational memes.

“A journey of experiences…”

“Growth and transformation…”

“The University celebrates you and with you…”

“Achievement is a verb, not a noun…” (“I think you’ll find…” mutters a Senior Lecturer in English.)

“Your first steps on a journey into value…”

“Every day a new beginning…”

He then gives gracious thanks for a huge donation which has enabled the construction of a new and shiny Student Learning Resource Facilitation Centre. That the benefactor, a Middle Eastern potentiate, was recently described by Amnesty International as a ‘blood-soaked psychopath’ is not mentioned.

“Now let me introduce our honorary graduate, someone who needs surely no introduction; a C-list Celebrity.”

The C-list Celebrity takes to the stage.

“Hello Wembley!” she says, “I’ve always wanted to say that!” The audience laughter is now bordering on the polite. The C-list Celebrity goes on to explain how lucky everyone is for being able to go to university. Didn’t happen in her day. She got where she is today by pure hard work.

“And a trust fund,” says a colleague sitting next to me.

“What’s that smell?” I whisper. “It’s foul.”

“Shh,” he says. “They’ll have let them in.”

“Eh? Let who in?” I ask.

“And so,” says the Vice Chancellor once the C-list Celebrity has finished, “let us now get on to the main business of the day. It gives me great pleasure to confer a Bachelors degree with Honours to Lidia Abbot for Civic Engineering.”

Forever cursed to be the first in every alphabetical list, Lidia comes on stage, collects her fake scroll from the Vice Chancellor, waves happily to her far distant family, and is ripped to shreds by a pack of wolves that flood across the stage like a wire haired stream of grey death.

The audience cheers happily.

“A Bachelors Honours degree to Assad Abdi for Management Studies.” Assad takes his scroll, waves, and is similarly dispatched in a whirl of snapping canine teeth.

“Is this supposed to happen?” I ask, in the same weary tones I used when I found out that we were going to 100% online teaching.

“Yes, of course,” says my neighbour. “We don’t rent out Wembley Conference Centre for no reason. Do you realise how much this costs the University?”

“Ah. Well of course,” I say, a bit confused, my mind mostly on the four hundred and twenty unmarked exam papers sitting in my office.

A steady flow of students cross the stage to be ripped limb from limb and the bloody lumps waved around and fought over by the circling pack, who don’t seem to be getting any less hungry.

I am nudged by the lecturer next to me. “Oh, interesting one next. Basha Amin. Brilliant student. Got a First. He gets a four second head-start with a First.”

Basha makes a good go at getting to the other side of the stage, but isn’t quite fast enough. The wolves grab by him the legs, rip out his windpipe, and drag his lifeless body around the stage in victory. The audience clap enthusiastically.

Finally after twenty minutes or so one student does make it safely to the other side of the stage, to a roar of appreciation from the audience.

“Well she’s captain of the relay team, and got silver in Tokyo and a bronze in Paris, so its hardly surprising,” says my neighbour, looking up from the sudoku that he’d managed to smuggle in.

The student is greeted warmly the by one of the bursars offstage, she hands him her fake scroll and he hands her a contract committing her to the repayment of her £45,000 tuition fee loan. Once she’s signed, she’s free to leave and live the rest of her life.

After that it mostly goes to plan and there is little more to comment about. One student tries to escape by jumping off the front of the stage, but she breaks her leg and can’t move as the pack of wolves leap into the front row to devour her and several of the families unlucky enough to sitting near. It takes the bursars and their team of security guards armed with big nets several minutes to get the wolves back on stage.

Regretfully, there’s always one exhibitionist student who takes it too far. Simon Hargreaves (Lower Second in Politics) takes his fake scroll, drops his trousers and moons the audience. His genitalia are bitten clean off as some of his friends in the audience (who he’d forewarned) take pictures and post them on Instagram. Some people laugh, but they shouldn’t. It only encourages that sort of thing.

Richard is an artist, author and print-maker. Literature-wise he is happiest with a book of illustrated Victorian fairy tales, something dark and Scandinavian or PG Wodehouse. As an artist he aims to establish a completely sustainable practice where all his tools and materials are hand-made from recycled or foraged sources. He is discovering that achieving this aim isn’t as easy as it sounds.

The Fantastic Writers Collective is a group of UK-based writers who enjoy telling stories about the weird and the wonderful.

Our debut anthology will be published in early 2026. In the meantime, subscibe to Fantastic for updates, as well as flash fiction, poetry and musings about books, writing and the thing lurking under the bed.

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Down to the Bone

by Maria Sanger

In Oxfam she idly opened the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary. Looked under W for whale fall. One word or two? Hyphenated? It wasn’t there. The words of the diver from the podcast she’d watched umpteen times replayed in her head. ‘A whale fall happens when the whale’s dead body falls to the ocean floor. Its huge carcass nourishes organisms for decades’. She slammed the book shut and squeezed it back on the shelf. How splendid it must be to support life for years to come.

But then the fiery feathers of a red boa caught her eye. It was only five quid. She sauntered from the mirror back to the counter, enjoying the feathery strands brushing against her arms.

‘Looks good on you,’ said the volunteer at the till. ‘To be honest, never thought I’d shift it.’

‘Why not?’ She handed over the last folded note from her purse.

He stuck the fiver in the till and banged the drawer shut. ‘Can’t remember whose it was now.’ He scratched his head. ‘Oh, it was a while back. Most people say it’s not the sort of thing they’d wear for long. Too itchy.’

No matter how many times she’d washed it over the past three weeks, there was still the faint smell of the charity shop. And lately she’d noticed something else odd. Every time she removed her coat, she found it difficult to pull the boa away from her neck. It was as if the thing had started to develop suckers on the ends of its feathers, but when she peered closely it was only static nylon.

But the boa was so cosy. Even though it was itchy, she enjoyed the feel of its embrace, experienced the warmth and closeness she’d once shared in those hasty flings from her college days. What with her new diet she’d been feeling the cold. And she was fed up with her colleagues, Jenny and Margaret from the office, her mother – everyone wittering on that she was putting on weight. Strange, it seemed like the boa was the only thing in her life that didn’t reject her.

She did seem to be always hungry. She put it down to the daily swim in the sea. Cold. Bracing even after she stripped down to her swimsuit. She’d leave her clothes and boa next to the foil-wrapped tuna and cucumber sandwiches under her towel. Then she dived into the foaming waves. She rolled on her back, dipped down and under, mimicking a fish. Opening and closing her mouth, she imagined the shoals being let in. And then a sudden wave hit. It all went in slow motion – the rush of water and flapping tails past her face. And the gurgling...She swallowed each and every one.

The brine mixed with bloated fish made her belch. She swam to the shore, towelled dry, and dressed quickly. Her tummy felt distended more than when she ate her sandwiches. Unwrapping the foil, she tossed them to the gulls.

It started to rain and the water soaked through her coat. A pricking sensation as though the feathers were poking into the bones of her frame.

Oh, why had she even jumped into the water?

On the way home, she stared at her reflection in the shop windows. She seemed more rounded than usual – must be the convex glass. No way could she go back to the office now. With each step, liquid swilled around her stomach.

Back home, she turned the key in the lock and pushed open the front door. A sudden shiver took hold. The bare planks and blue walls made her flat look even colder than the sea. She removed her coat and hung it on the hallway peg. She reached for the boa, but only touched the bare skin of her neck. Strange, she was sure she’d put it on. No doubt the boa was still lying on the beach waiting for someone to take it back to the charity shop.

Resigned to its loss, she thought that a bath would warm her. The water gushed from the tap, and she poured in the last of the sandalwood-scented bubbles. She threw her tracksuit bottoms, top, bra and undies over the back of the bathroom chair. The water was hot when she dipped her toe in. How lovely to soak in the warmth. The bubbles tickled like the sensation of the feathery boa. As she swept her hand under the bath water, it brushed against what seemed to be trailing grasses. She pulled at one of the strands, but it would not budge. They seemed to be growing out of her legs.

She’d been working too many hours lately. She’d have to ring the office tomorrow; tell them she wouldn’t be in this week. As tiredness surged through, gradually she began to slip down. There wasn’t much space in the bath any more to fit her whole body, but the enamel started to close around her, the warm water turning tepid, then cold. She closed her eyes; felt herself drifting, submerging to the depths below. She would be there a very long time, her skeleton lying in bath snow. Prickling sensations of needles digging down – feathery red strands that stretched up to the surface replenishing themselves on her bones.

Maria holds an MA in Creative Writing and is currently at Anglia Ruskin University in the final year of a PhD. She is currently working on a collection of short fiction, The Ridge and The Chessmen, that melds history and fantasy and is inspired by the Lewis Chessmen, discovered on the Isle of Lewis in 1831. Maria lives in Ely, Cambridgeshire and loves reading anything uncanny, weird, strange happenings in the landscape...or inanimate objects coming to life...

This piece was inspired by this incredible YouTube video: The Stages of Whale Decomposition. It’s long but it’s absolutely worth a watch.

The Fantastic Writers Collective is a group of UK-based writers who enjoy telling stories about the weird and the wonderful.

Our debut anthology will be published in early 2026. In the meantime, subscribe to Fantastic for updates, as well as flash fiction, poetry and musings about books, writing and the thing lurking under the bed.

Subscribe now