The debut short story collection from Seán Padraic Birnie does indeed haunt. Sown with seeds of sorrow and grief, and imbued with disquieting bodily horrors, the tales in “I Would Haunt You if I Could” are the product of an uncanny and febrile imagination. Birnie’s writing balances on the knife’s edge of the horror and literary divide. Stories that cut and bleed. Stories that linger and haunt.
Seán Padraic Birnie is a writer and photographer from Brighton. He holds a B.A. from Manchester Metropolitan University in English Literature and Creative Writing, and an M.A. in Photography from the University of Brighton, where he works as a Technical Demonstrator on the photography courses. His short fiction has appeared in venues such as Black Static, BFS Horizons, Litro, and Shadows & Tall Trees, and his writing on photography has appeared in scholarly journals and artists’ books.
“These are strange, paranoid tales, no less dangerous or jagged for the comic matter-of-fact way in which they are told. Birnie’s style is deceptively amiable – he ushers you into his thought experiments cheerfully enough, and then blindsides you with accounts of real love, grief and despair. These stories get right under your skin. They unnerve you. They will indeed haunt you.” — Robert Shearman, Author of We All Hear Stories in the Dark