From contemporary body horror to timeless fable and epic fantasy, these ten short stories will thrill you in their exhilarating shifts across genre and style. Disorientating as a reality-melding fever dream, a deep sense of terror will grip you as recurrent themes of misogyny, gaslighting and generational trauma emerge, shaping the monsters that lurk within these pages: darkly funny, menacingly off-kilter and grotesquely human.
Then one night, she went to the bathroom.
She had been watching tv, like always, and was alone in the house, like always. She did her business, closed the lid, and flushed. While washing her hands, she glanced at herself in the mirror. Sagging eyelids, wrinkles, rough and dry skin. White hair peeking out from the roots of her dye job. She was fiddling with her hair, thinking she'd need another hair appointment soon, when she saw, through the mirror, the lid of the toilet seat move.
Clack.
A wet hand rose from inside the toilet and pushed the lid open. Another wet hand emerged. The two hands gripped the edge of the toilet.
She watched as the back of a person's head, thick with hair and slick with water, rose from the toilet bowl.
