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Quartier Perdu
by Sean O’Brien
(Comma Press, £9.99)
THE GOTHIC tale is to literature what the tardigrade is to animal biology — an astonishingly adaptable and resilient form. It was established by William Thomas Beckford and Horace Walpole, popularised by Mary Shelley, Edgar Allan Poe and Charles Dickens and rejuvenated by modern practitioners such as Angela Carter, Sarah Waters and Stephen King.
It ought to be running out of steam by now, stuck in a rut of familiar images and over-rehearsed language. Not as far as Sean O’Brien is concerned. His second story collection Quartier Perdu includes old fashioned spine-chillers, intensely lyrical tales of ambiguous perception and in-your-face stories of supernatural threat.
