PERFECT, Stories of the Impossible
‘So exquisitely drawn, Sally Emerson’s stories are full of gripping twists. They’re uncanny, and quite unlike anything else you’ll read.’ Jane Thynne
“An unmissable spring book. This wonderous collection of short stories from best-selling author Sally Emerson injects just the right dose of the supernatural into the everyday. In one, a public registrar receives death certificates dated in the future, and in another, an infertile couple discover a way to clone themselves.’ Tatler
‘Really creepy and good. Hard-edged suspense and pared down prose, like a feminist Roald Dahl.’ Amanda Craig
‘Sally Emerson’s wonderful stories begin in calmly bourgeois settings, but soon reveal Gothic shadows of menace and desire. Characters give birth to clones or foresee the fates of strangers. In serene houses and tranquil gardens, a boy and girl find themselves trapped in a Brothers Grimm fairy tale, and a medievalist is haunted by figures from Renaissance artworks. Love, sex and stormy weather threaten or imprison the unwary.’ John Walsh
‘Sally Emerson takes her exploration of domestic life and its dramas into the realm of the extraordinary and even the seemingly impossible. Emerson’s folkloric, even mythical, style is expertly executed….and prompts lasting questions in the mind of the reader as all the best myths are able to do. Emerson’s careful character building is as artful as it is intriguing.’ The Word Factory
‘The plotlines are consistently compelling……What really elevates these stories is Sally Emerson’s ability, in concise, flowing and polished prose, to conjure up the pains and passions of love, whether waning or blooming. Love is the common thread here - sometimes found, sometimes lost, ever attendant.’ TLS
This is Sally Emerson’s first collection of short stories. All are new or rather they are new to the page. All have haunted her mind for a long time.
In these stories of menace and desire, Sally Emerson introduces the eerie into her keen-eyed portraits of everyday life. In them love, sex and stormy weather really do threaten or imprison the unwary.
A clerk in a register office receives death certificates dated in the future; can she save the victims? A childless woman finds a way to clone her husband; but will the cloned son be condemned to repeat the mistakes of the father? A suburban mother finds her health supplements have amorous side effects; can she resist the waves of lust and keep her hands off her neighbours?
Emerson’s tales of ordinary life invaded by forces beyond our control are beguiling and uncanny and spiked with her trademark black humour as she celebrates the tenuous gap between reality and unreality. Likened to Roald Dahl and Helen Dunmore, with a dash of Shirley Jackson, this is compulsive reading by a writer of the very highest quality.
She writes: ‘Three of the seven stories in my collection, ‘Perfect, Stories of the Impossible’ are long, over 10,000 words, and each one could be a novel but I didn’t want to digress and didn’t want to take up more pages, I wanted to pour everything into a smaller space without losing anything. I wanted the structure to be strong and each action each character takes to be unexpected yet extraordinary right to the end. I wanted to keep the pace and the joy and the mischief and the sense that anything might happen at any time. Though they seem at first to be dark, I want to be able to see a way out, to think there is no hope but then to see the hope, and that is what I have intended for this collection, for those who read it to be taken through darkness into light. Of my stories, my favourites are the title one ‘Perfect’, about a woman who clones her husband against his will, and the last one ‘The Couple’, about a charismatic couple in LA who turn out to have far, far, far more power than anyone could imagine. But in a way ‘Fairy Tales’ is the most unsettling partly because it really could happen to anyone.'
‘Emerson’s skill is to subvert the humdrum with sinister undercurrents’ Sunday Times
‘Sally Emerson has a talent for terror of the best kind, she understands obsession and hints chillingly at evil’ Daily Telegraph
‘A writer who excels in portraying the darkness beneath polished surfaces’ TLS