Introduction by Gemma Files

INTRODUCTION

Gemma Files

Teaching is one of the great joys in my life, though it wasn’t always that way. Once upon a time, it was “just” a job—something I clung to desperately as my film criticism career ebbed away, always aware that my sole university degree was in journalism, not education. In a way, it took losing a full-time teaching position, as well as using that loss to (eventually) jump-start my the next phase of my professional fiction-writing career, to reconnect me with the quote-quote simple joys of helping someone else nurture their own creative spark by spinning a moment’s absent thought into something entirely different, black on white, words on a page. A beautiful, tumorous blossom of metaphor run wild with narrative for blood, referential imagery for bone.

This is how I first met Sarah Read . . . not in body, but mind to mind. By watching a creepy, frightening, wonderful idea she pitched me evolve, stage by stage, into something which would eventually become one of the best horror stories of the year. It was called “Endoskeletal,” and you’ll meet it soon enough, since it opens this debut collection of Sarah’s short fiction. Let me put it to you this way: it makes me wish I’d written it, even though I know damn well I never could have.

The walls of the jar were thin enough that she could see the glow of light behind it, and the silhouette of a lumpy shadow inside. She photographed every angle, every detail, and made sure the pictures were uploaded and saved before grabbing her scalpel and tweezers. She both hated and wanted this part. Her pulse grew distracting, a pounding in her sore joints, and it would continue to rise until the beautiful thing in front of her was destroyed. And destroying the sample would destroy her career, or make it.

Now granted, any story involving archaeology is basically guaranteed my full attention, but what I love about what Sarah’s doing here is the way she cross-breeds her utterly convincing grasp of methodology with sharp psychological observation, making us care deeply about both the artefact her protagonist is examining and her own bone-deep regret that the only way to confirm the ancient mystery before her—let alone to understand it—is to lose even a single part of something so irreplaceable. Simple, clear, concise, human; these sentences confirm how much I love the way that Sarah thinks, almost as much as I love the things she thinks about. What I like best about this paragraph, in other words, is pretty much everything.

But man, I kind of like this one that comes a bit later on even better: