This collection of fifteen stories straddles the border between the territory of ordinary anxiety and that of existential nightmare. These tales of dread and darkness do not feature the traditional demons that haunt country houses or pop up from unopened graves, but rather characters who inhabit the familiar scenes of life. These are tales of ordinary people, and this makes them all the more disquieting, and their horrors more sharply edged, precisely because they are set in modern, everyday reality.