Haunt scoops début short story collection from Parry

Haunt Publishing, a Scottish indie press specialising in Gothic, horror and dark fiction, has signed Heather Parry’s début short story collection, This Is My Body, Given For You.

Rebecca Wojturska acquired exclusive English language rights in the UK, the Channel Islands, the Isle of Man and the Irish Republic from Emma Shercliff of Laxfield Literary Associates. It will be published in May 2023.

The synopsis reads: “A girl suffering a bizarre menstrual aberration is exploited by those around her, including her father. A boy expresses his love for a nonhuman man by making himself animalistic. A girl abandoned by her community discovers the possibility of transmutation through cannibalism. A man struggles with his wife’s choices around her existence, and considers whether he should leave her alone in her semi-oblivion, or join her.

“In This Is My Body, Given For You, Heather Parry places in our hands 15 stories in which the body is something that can be changed, altered, and escaped from.”

Born in Rotherham and based in Glasgow, Parry has won the Bridge Award for an Emerging Writer, Cove Park’s Emerging Writer Residency and the Laxfield Literary Launch Prize. In 2021 she was a Hawthornden Fellow. Her first novel, Orpheus Builds a Girl, was published by Belgravia Books in 2022.