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Vampires, Vikings and a dybbuk too

Traditional folklore inspires debut author Leon Craig

February 17, 2022 11:44
Leon Craig c Jan Radke
4 min read

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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