Of Love and Other Nighmares - Volume I

A Mosaic of Desire, Oddities and Ruin

Love, with the lights left on and the kindness removed.

Seventeen stories, each one posing as a love story with varying degrees of plausibility. Some are nightmares wearing perfume. Others are prayers said in the wrong direction. All of them are guilty.

A private museum keeps the objects people loved past the point of usefulness, the ones that would not break when the love left. A philosopher turns pornography into a syllabus, and the syllabus into a weapon. A man builds a profitable career appraising other people’s marriages the way a scrapyard appraises cars. A woman hides a stain on a bedsheet for seven years because it is the only honest thing in the palace.

This is desire, blasphemy and the small domestic apocalypses we arrange for the people we cannot leave alone. It is grotesque. It is funny in the places that should frighten you, and tender in the places that should not. A corridor of half-open doors, with someone behind each one doing the thing they will never confess to their therapist.

For readers of Edgar Allan Poe and Mariana Enríquez.

You will recognise someone in here. That is the problem.

Adult readers only. Contains explicit sexual content, violence and religious transgression.