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Visual and performance artist, and winner of the inaugural Kill Your Darlings Manuscript Award, SJ Norman turns his hand to fiction with spectacular results...
This brilliant collection of short fiction explores the shifting spaces of desire, loss and longing. Inverting and queering the gothic and romantic traditions, each story represents a different take on the concept of a haunting or the haunted. Though it ranges across themes and locations – from small-town Australia to Hokkaido to rural England – Permafrost is united by the power of the narratorial voice, with its auto-fictional resonances, dark wit and swagger.
Whether recounting the confusion of a child trying to decipher their father and stepmother’s new relationship, the surrealness of an after-hours tour of Auschwitz, or a journey to wintry Japan to reconnect with a former lover, Permafrost unsettles, transports and impresses in equal measure.
Author: SJ Norman
Paperback Published 28 September 2021 256 pages
‘Permafrost is a rare, dark phenomenon of a book, an exquisite collection of stories that are as gloriously unsettling as they are enthralling. It takes a writer of exceptional ability to create something that will haunt a reader long after the cover is turned: SJ Norman is such a literary genius. Reading their work is like attending a seance where, afterwards, the ghosts never quite leave. I am in awe.’ -Hannah Kent
‘A beguiling collection of haunted and haunting stories, adventures in the everyday uncanny, that grab you by the throat and demand a hearing. Norman is a maestro of mood and their sentences are exquisite. His ghosts will whisper in your ear long after the final page.’ -Yves Reese
‘This collection of spectral stories is genuinely unnerving, genuinely exhilarating. The writing is bold, slyly perverse, and always dextrous. Reading Permafrost is akin to being wide awake in a dream, the stories start possessing you as a reader. Eerie and astonishing in equal measure.’- Christos Tsiolkas