Short story, ‘Meat’, is coming soon!

My short thriller, Meat will be published in The Monster Capital: Tales of Unease for our Times, by Comma Press, soon (June 2025 at the moment).

Here’s what the story is about:

Lily is an artist about to stage her first solo show in her husband, Lar’s gallery. Determined to make it a success, she decides to create living Memento mori sculptures featuring her husband’s lab-grown meat. But as the opening of the show is almost upon them, Lily will discover the consequences of her decision, and the dark secrets her husband has been keeping from her.

If you’re interested in seeing how I came up with the idea, I’ve written about my process in my newsletter.

This is what the anthology is about:

There is something monstrous about capital, something alive and creeping about it. It’s been compared to a parasite, a vampire, a zombie-maker; one that transforms human lives into dead labour, and marshals all creative, free-thinking individuality into the long trudge that is work, money-making, aspiration. The philosopher Mark Fisher famously compared capital to the alien in John Carpenter’s The Thing: an ‘infinitely plastic entity capable of metabolising and absorbing anything with which it comes into contact.’ For the latest book in its acclaimed horror series, Comma has invited ten authors to explore this emergent, monstrous property of capital through supernatural and surreal means. Thus, we see characters disappearing into algorithm-driven spending addictions, property development spreading like a virus across cityscapes leaving buildings empty and people homeless, and citizens so addicted to the ‘news drug’ that promises everything is about to change that nothing does. We may think of capitalism as the ghost in the machine, driving things forward. But what happens when we become the ghosts?

It’s available to pre-order here.