Perfect — Sally Emerson

My collection of seven stories are linked by the theme 'Impossible', and explore where reality blends into the supernatural. In all the stories the magical is waiting just outside ordinary life, ready to enter and illuminate and change everything forever. A friend said they were a mix of Roald Dahl and Helen Dunmore with a dash of Shirley Jackson, For instance, in the first story, 'The Death Certificates', an uncanny love story, a quiet young woman who looks after her sick and cantankerous father, works at sending out death certificates but begins to find on her desk certificates dated in the future. When these deaths then take place, she tries to save others mentioned in the certificates including a jogger whose certificate predicts his death from a heart attack. As she struggles to save him and others from their futures she changes her own future. Here is a sketch of another four of the stories, and I enclose 'Perfect' about cloning. All seven stories together are 64,000 words.'Lucky with the weather' centres on an eccentric husband who is given to secretive behaviour and who turns out to be a weather God.'Lust' is a story of a tired mother and academic who is prescribed a sequence of supplements by an assistant (called Robin Goodfellow) in her local health shop that has the most surprising effect on her. Whenever she takes them she is overcome by powerful lust for the men she meets, with enlivening results. 'Fairy Tales' has a hint of Shirley Jackson as the horror grows. More gothic than supernatural, it describes an eager young student Charlie thrilled with finding a room in a splendid house in Clapham with an engaging landlady, and being able to move out of his parents' stifling house in Epsom. He puts aside his disquiet at the long questionnaire she made him fill in beforehand, and indeed his unease at some of the things she says and does. When another lodger arrives, Elinor, and they are drawn to each other, he begins to realise just how ill they are becoming and that the walls are closing in on them. 'The Gods' is a high wire act set in Los Angeles and in London and explores the balance between good and evil that keeps the world going. A young English historian becomes obsessed with the ravishing beauty with white hair he encounters at the Getty and her wild partner who smokes and juggles in the building without anyone taking any notice. He recognises her face in early medieval manuscripts, in early Madonnas. Together with the tomboyish Alice, an expert on early heresies, he finds out more about the couple he fears aren't just charismatic Los Angeles types but have been around since the beginning of time. Like the rest of the stories, this is very much rooted in a sense of normality, and the relationship between the historian Martin and Alice helps to ground it.In short I have tried to create a funny, highly original, jubilant collection which suggests the wildness at the edge of normality as in my early bestselling novels 'Second Sight' and 'Fire Child'. The stories offer surprises not just in the subject matter of the stories but within their plotting, in particular the drama of their final twists.