Trigger Warning

Trigger Warning: Short Fictions and Disturbances brings together stories, poems, and other short pieces spanning horror, fantasy, science fiction, fairy tale, and fabulism.

The collection opens with "Making a Chair," a poem in which the narrator, intending to write, instead assembles an office chair, drawing an analogy between building furniture and building books. In "A Lunar Labyrinth," a traveler hikes up a hill with an elderly guide to see the site of a burned-down rosemary maze once walked according to the moon's phases. When the full moon rises, the narrator enters the regrown maze and sees a dark, howling shape circling its perimeter. A growling voice tells him to run, and the story ends as the narrator stumbles forward, implying the guide has led him there as prey.

"The Thing About Cassandra" centers on Stuart Innes, a model and painter who, as a lonely fifteen-year-old, invented a girlfriend named Cassandra by writing her name on his school exercise books and fabricating dates. Twenty years later, old friends and family begin encountering Cassandra in person. At Stuart's gallery preview, a red-haired woman stages a publicity stunt and introduces herself as Cassandra, later proving her identity by showing Stuart his own teenage drawing of her. After they return to his flat, the narrative shifts to Cassandra's perspective: She, too, invented Stuart when she was a teenager. When she looks down at the bed, Stuart's body has become a silhouette of dust on the bedspread. She has unmade him by touching him, just as a childhood imaginary friend once dissolved when she hugged it.

"Down to a Sunless Sea," narrated in second person along the Rotherhithe docks in London, follows a woman who tells the gray water about her son, who ran away to sea and was cannibalized by starving survivors in a lifeboat. She wears one of his bones on a chain and asks the listener to touch it; the listener stumbles away into the rain.

"The Truth Is a Cave in the Black Mountains" is the collection's longest piece. A dwarf narrator hires Calum MacInnes, a tall former cattle-reaver, to guide him to a legendary gold-filled cave on the Misty Isle (the Isle of Skye). At the cave, a whispering entity explains it gives visitors the illusion of gold, feeding on slivers of their souls in return. The entity appears to the narrator as the skeleton of his daughter Flora, her hair tangled in a thornbush. The narrator's true purpose emerges: Years earlier, Calum tied Flora to a thorn tree while stealing cattle, and she died there. After a confrontation, both men tumble off the mountainside. Calum is stranded on a ledge with a broken leg, and the narrator begins his long journey home.

"Orange" takes an inventive form: a teenage girl's written answers to an unseen investigator's questionnaire. Jemima Ramsey describes how her sister Nerys, obsessed with artificial tanning, applies a mysterious substance and begins glowing orange, floating above the carpet, and announcing plans for world domination. A spaceship materializes around their house, and alien beings take Nerys away.

"A Calendar of Tales" presents twelve interconnected stories, one for each month, ranging from a soldier personifying the year 2012 battling creatures at the edge of time, to a terminally ill woman who burns her medical records in a magical brazier and finds herself restored to health, to a genie who moves in with the woman who freed him and discovers contentment without granting wishes.

"The Case of Death and Honey" weaves together Sherlock Holmes's past and present. When his brother Mycroft dies, declaring Death itself a crime worth investigating, Holmes spends decades experimenting with bees, seeking an elixir of rejuvenation from plant extracts processed through honey. His search leads him to a remote Chinese village and a hive of unusual black bees kept by a sullen beekeeper called Old Gao. Holmes succeeds: His hands become young again. He departs, planning to share the honey with his old friend Watson. Old Gao, reasoning like a detective, drinks the remaining honey-water and plans to return as a younger version of himself.

"Click-Clack the Rattlebag" is a compact horror story in which a young man agrees to walk his girlfriend's little brother upstairs to bed. The boy describes monsters called Click-Clacks that drink their victims' insides and hang the remaining bones and skin on hooks to rattle in the wind. At the top of the house, something rattles in the dark. Small, firm fingers pull the narrator forward, revealing the boy himself is the creature.

Several shorter pieces explore varied registers. "And Weep, Like Alexander" features Obediah Polkinghorn, a professional "Uninventor" who removes harmful inventions from existence, only to discover smartphones. "Feminine Endings" takes the form of a love letter from a living statue that gradually reveals itself as a stalker's confession. "The Return of the Thin White Duke" follows an immortal ruler through a quest that strips away his identity until he emerges as a young musician in Beckenham, implying he has become David Bowie. The poems "Observing the Formalities" and "In Relig Odhráin" revisit familiar myths: The uninvited fairy from Sleeping Beauty defends her curse as a lesson in manners, while Saint Columba buries Saint Oran alive to silence the truths the dead know.

"Nothing O'Clock" is a Doctor Who story. The Kin, an entity that multiplies itself through time, escapes the prison built by the Time Lords, the ancient civilization that maintained its containment. It begins purchasing Earth in 1984, appearing in animal masks and offering enormous sums of cash. The Doctor and his companion Amy Pond arrive to find Earth depopulated. The Kin lures the Doctor into the TARDIS, his time-traveling craft, by impersonating Amy, intending to reach the dawn of time and populate all existence with itself. The Doctor instead delivers the Kin to a microsecond before the Big Bang, where time does not yet exist, stranding it in the void.

"The Sleeper and the Spindle" combines Snow White and Sleeping Beauty. A queen who once slept for a year in a glass coffin cancels her wedding to investigate a spreading magical sleep engulfing a neighboring kingdom. She discovers the golden-haired "princess" in the tower is not a victim but a predator who has been stealing youth from every sleeper for eighty years. The true victim is the old woman tending the castle, the original princess who was tricked into pricking her finger on the cursed spindle long ago; the queen finds it still lying on the tower floor. When the old woman stabs the creature with the spindle, its own magic turns against it and it crumbles to dust. Rather than return to her wedding, the queen walks east into the unknown.

The collection closes with "Black Dog," featuring Shadow Moon from Gaiman's novel American Gods. Walking through the English countryside, Shadow stays with Moira Callanish and her partner Oliver Bierce. He meets a woman named Cassie Burglass while hiking a nearby hill, but when he mentions Cassie to his hosts, they react with shock: Cassie was Moira's former partner who supposedly left the village years ago. Shadow realizes Cassie is a ghost. Following Oliver to an ancient hillside passageway at night, Shadow finds Cassie's mummified body sealed in the wall. Oliver confesses to her murder and summons a spectral black dog that attacks Shadow and tries to entomb him. Aided by Bast, a cat-goddess from Shadow's past, and spirits of Egyptian mummified cats, Shadow breaks free and confronts the creature, which retreats into Oliver. The pub landlord arrives at dawn after hearing screams, and Oliver is taken into custody. As they drive past a gibbet tree, Moira's sister recites a riddle about a wren nesting in a dead man's skull: In the midst of death, life keeps happening.