Mercy and Other Stories

Rebecca Lloyd’s first published collection of six­teen strange stories, nine of which are previously unpublished, is made up of tales of unease with a sprinkling of the ghostly, menacing and fantastical. The stories inhabit the fragile space between fantasy and reality, where the landscape is in constant flux and things are not quite as they seem.
 
In ‘Mercy’ a loving husband finds an un­usual method of prolonging his affec­tion for his wife, while the inhabitant of a half-way house finds a creative use for internet dating in ‘Salsa’. Alan runs away from the circus in ‘The Lover’, and in ‘The Reunion’, eccentric and elderly Isobel and Charles, struggling with the upkeep of their de­caying mans­ion, chose an entirely new way to face the future. In ‘Maynard’s Moun­tain’, the search for a lost lottery ticket involves a traveller family in a (literally) uphill task.
 
Rebecca Lloyd’s is a stylish and distinc­tive new voice in the field of the strange tale, and it is hoped that this collection will chill and entertain in equal meas­ure.
 
Winning the 2008 Bristol Short Story Prize for her story 'The River', Rebecca Lloyd, a writer and editor from Bristol, UK, was shortlisted in the 2010 Dundee International Book Prize and was a semi-finalist in the Hudson Prize for a short story collection in the same year. Her novel Halfling was published by Walker Books in 2011, and in the following year she was co-editor with Indira Chandrasekhar, of Pangea, an Anthology of Stories from Around the Globe, with Thames River Press. In 2014, her short story collection Whelp and Other Stories was shortlisted in the Paul Bowles Award for Short Fiction, and her collection The View From Endless Street will be published by WiDo Publishing.
 
Contents:

• Mercy
• The Careless Hour
• The Stone
• Salsa
• The Meat Freezer
• Dust
• What Comes?
• Momentum
• Lucky Cat
• The Bath
• The Gathering
• Gone to the Deep
• Maynard’s Mountain
• The Lover
• All That Follows
• The Reunion

 Limited:  sewn hardback of 220 pages, printed lithographically, with silk ribbon marker, head and tailbands, and d/w.