fiction

I’m sitting against the subway stairs, watching people do that tap tap quick walk they do when they want to show everyone how busy they are. Hurrying to get to Queens or Brooklyn. The sky’s all pink and gold, making long shadows and people…

The scream in Eric’s neck started Bronx cheering at a higher volume than it had been for a whole week. 'You're scum. You're scum. You're scum.'         Lying on his bed like a steel ruler, he wasn't long home from a sweaty night shift at…

Padraig Kenny’s children’s novel, Tin, opens with an engineer, Mr Absalom, crunching through snow with a human boy, Christopher, and a robot child for sale, Jack. Absalom swaps Jack’s red hair for brown, ‘because nobody buys gingers, awful…

The American writer H.P. Lovecraft wrote weird fiction. His work is both weird, in the conventional sense of the word, and Weird, in a more specific sense. His tales are not typical horror stories, but instead invoke a type of cosmic…

Restless Souls is Dan Sheehan’s debut novel and it’s a bold experiment, straddling several genres and constantly confounding the reader’s expectations. At first you think it’s going to be a war junkie’s story from the 1990s siege of…

HeadStuff Literature Submission Call HeadStuff is relaunching its Literature section and we want to read your submissions! New Literature Editor Aileen wants to read work that shocks, surprises and devastates.  Work that tells truths of…

An accidental murder kicks off a crime fuelled chain of events that is both hilarious and heart breaking in Lisa McInerney’s roaring debut. At the centre of the interweaving narratives is the tough but troubled teenager Ryan Cusack. The…

From its broadest strokes to its tiniest details, Flann O’Brien’s The Third Policeman is built out of weirdness. Weirdness is not only its dominant style but its very element, its operating logic, its final destination, and its means of…

Sarah Pinborough's 13 minutes; A book that makes me glad I was a complete dork in school. What can I say in this review without giving away all the twists and turns of Sarah Pinborough’s YA thriller, 13 Minutes. Its good, really good. Go…

No Dummy by S.P. Hannaway —You prick! You useless prick! Monty gives himself hell. There’s no one else to do it. —Where is it? he spits and splutters. —You’ve lost it, haven’t you? You can do bugger all without it. His body isn’t…