Sometime's We're Cruel and Other Stories

by J.A.W. McCarthy

Genres: Literary Fiction; Horror

Synopsis

A town where people go missing and inexplicably return as cruel versions of themselves.

A not-quite-human mother races against time to build a new body for her ailing daughter.

Lovesick ghosts inhabit the body parts of living people in a world where the only other choice is amputation.

Obsession. Selfishness. Cruelty. Doppelgängers. In these dark, speculative stories—six reprints and six never before published, including the novelette “Girls Tied to Trees”—J.A.W. McCarthy explores how far humans and the not-quite-human will go to tame the darkness in their world and within themselves.

"...the twelve horror stories in Sometimes We're Cruel are soaked in hell. The characters stagger, often broken, through these stories while carrying our hearts, often broken, in the best ways. Shame, desire, guilt, longing, and, yes, cruelty—these are achingly human narratives full of wounds that won't heal. They possess a through line, a bloody thread leading back to the insistence on viewing ourselves through the eyes of other people." -Michael Wehunt, author of Greener Pastures

Release date: August 17, 2021

Publisher: Cemetery Gates Media

Print pages: 170