Description

The Dummy & Other Uncanny Stories by Nicholas Royle

Hardcover – Swan River Press – May 2018 – 181 pages

In his third collection, The Dummy & Other Uncanny Stories, Royle focuses on archetypes and phenomena that, through their particular melding of the familiar and the unfamiliar, produce uneasy, or uncanny, effects. In these stories he writes about doppelgängers, ghosts, dummies, disconnected body parts, impaired vision, the dead and the prospect of death, not without a macabre sense of humour.

These stories reflect Royle’s continuing development as an exponent of the form, in which he is always seeking to learn and to grow, and to push against boundaries.

Contents
“The Other Man”
“The Blind Man”
“Sitting Tenant”
“The Trees”
“Hide and Seek”
“The Blink”
“The Empty Flat”
“The Dummy”
“Maths Tower”
“Dead End”
“The Cellar”
“The Reunion”
“Moving Out”
“Jayne Anne Phillips”
“The Family Room”
“Cuckoo”
“This Video Does Not Exist”
“Lancashire”
“Acknowledgements”