When writer-editor Leon Craig realised that she was not quite ready to write the novel she had been ruminating for some time, she turned to short stories. “I had this big project that I couldn’t quite get into and so, while honing my own style, I started writing short stories as an experiment,” she explains. “It gave me a lot of freedom. Then the stories took on more and more form and started coalescing into a collection.”
The result is Craig’s debut book, Parallel Hells, a thrilling, dark and sometimes strange collection of 13 short stories in which she draws on elements of folklore and gothic horror to explore queer identity, power, love and loneliness. “I was almost surprised by the [writing] momentum,” she says, “though it was a very happy thing.”
The stories include a murderous anti-heroine in 10th Century Viking-era Iceland who becomes suspicious of her husband’s relationship with his best friend; an ancient being who feasts on 21st Century Londoners and an Oxford University historian who delights in using occult methods from a medieval tome on her nemesis. Vampires, corpse brides, fairy curses all feature, as does Jewish folklore. In The Bequest, a woman is possessed by a dybbuk when she discovers more about her family history than she anticipated and in Unfinished and Unformed, a golem’s powers exceed the expectations of its creator.
Traditional Jewish folklore is, says Craig, a kind of source of strength and enduring interest. “And as with all folklore, it prompts you to look at the world and your emotional life in a different way. So many people have retold these stories, but they all mean different things to different people.”
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I’m speaking to Craig, 29, via Zoom from Berlin where she has been based since late 2020, “partly for romantic reasons.” With her cropped pixie hair and striking big silver leaf earrings, she looks the epitome of cool Berlin chic. Leon is short for Leonora, a nickname she has had since childhood. “I don’t actually remember who gave it to me, but it has always stuck.” As the daughter of novelist, Amanda Craig and economist Rob Cohen, writing and books are in her DNA. All she will say about that is she feels incredibly lucky to have had a lot of access to books and education and “seeing the nuts and bolts of the writing life has been extremely valuable.”
Craig studied medieval literature at Oxford University and remains fascinated by the subject. “It’s the intensity that survives in the writing,” she says. “Feelings like deep sadness, rage, joy or pleasure tend to stick in the mind for much longer. What I found, particularly with Chaucer, was that you might have this idea of the Middle Ages of being a time of dirt and drudgery but there’s also so much humour, debauchery and a desire to seize enjoyment,” she says, pausing. “I suppose being so strongly attracted to it has meant I’ve wanted to attempt it in my own writing.”
Although the stories move between time periods and do not necessarily all “touch neatly upon one another,” Craig thinks they come from a common wellspring of the gothic. Many of her protagonists are struggling, too, in some way and have concerns about themselves such as, “If I’m myself, who is with me? And if I tell the truth, what are the consequences going to be?” They are, she admits, living a parallel hell in one way or another, a reference to the book’s title but, “Maybe I’m drawing on the idea of a hell that isn’t necessarily a permanent state for everybody. And I hope that towards the end of the collection, readers start to see characters have suffered and encountered the worst parts of themselves and are maybe coming out of this a little bit.” Certainly, in the last story, Saplings, there is a glimmer of hope for the two lovers who defy a transphobic father in order to escape the clutches of a curse.
Craig grew up in north London and although she describes her family as not “particularly devout,” being Jewish is something she has always been proud of. Berlin is, she says, a really great place to be queer but she has found living amongst the Stolpersteine, unsettling. “I’m hardly the first Jewish person to say this about them, but I also think there are quite a few other countries who could perhaps do better at remembering these things.”
Craig’s day job is as an editor for the publisher, Serpent’s Tail, where she works in literary fiction and memoir as well as looking after their classics list. Working in publishing is an obvious asset but, as a writer with intimate knowledge of the business, she is acutely aware of the importance of maintaining some distance. “You need to allow someone else to be the expert because there are things about it that you are just too close to see.”
Craig is a member of the LQBTQ+ writing collective, the Future is Back, and, over the last few years, sees there has been a gradual, positive shift in representation of queer characters in fiction. “I remember growing up and not really being able to find access to literature that was about queer characters, particularly queer women. Things are slowly getting better, particularly as people begin to realise there’s such a ready market for them. And what I’m trying to do with my own work, I think, is show characters who are people whose queerness is an intrinsic part of their lives, but they are also dealing with problems that are beyond the mere fact of their queerness.”
Following the publication of Parallel Hells, Craig’s debut novel, The Decadence, comes out in 2024, which is, she says, “a belated reply to country house novels like The Shooting Party and Brideshead Revisited in which queer and Jewish characters appear at the margins, often as caricatures.” Her wish is that “the cultural flowering” taking place within publishing to encourage writers from the LQBTQ+ community will continue. “There are quite a lot of brilliant schemes currently underway and exciting online magazines opening up. I hope we’ll see that translating into more and more people getting book deals because I’d love to have more peers!”
Parallel Hells by Leon Craig is published by Sceptre this week
