Morgan Delaney

Dark, strange and fantastic fiction

Killer lists

10 Types of Berliner You’ll Meet On The U-Bahn

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An electrical boy with a suggestive logo on Weinbergsweg in Berlin
Photo by Morgan Delaney. Emergency Dildo Box on Weinbergsweg? #BerlinsRobotsNeedLoveToo

We’re travelling at the moment, so as promised, here’s your guide to some of the major fauna infesting Berlin’s public transport in this week’s special Killer List! Enjoy!

  1. The Zehlendorfers

Occurrence: Late evening/Early night.

Friends from their university days are visiting Berlin. This blast from the past has made them frisky, so they decide to leave the car at home and “slum” it to a show (perhaps at the Wintergarten, or the Friedrichstadtpalast). Now they are on their way back home.

In their fifties, Herr Zehlendorf is still tall, but needs a slightly bigger belt. Frau Zehlendorf has let her long hair go grey.

They appear relaxed as they sit beside each other holding hands, but Frau Zehlendorf sits closer to her husband than usual and Herr Zehlendorf is sitting very straight, despite the discomfort to his spine after having sat for so long already.

Careful to avoid catching anyone’s eye, they radiate alertness as they count the remaining stops until they are safely back home.

  1. The Mohawk from Madrid.

Occurrence: Irregular/Any time

A lot of Spanish people live in Berlin, the most colourful type of which is the Spanish punk.

It’s easy to see why they like Berlin, where their appearance (mohawks, piercings, facial tattoos) blends in perfectly with Berlin’s “original” punks who haven’t changed (except for getting older, and, perhaps, their t-shirts) since their first visit to Kreuzberg’s SO36 in 1978.

  1. The Sweet Homeless Man.

Occurrence: Constant/Mornings to late evenings

Begging and busking are not allowed on the trains of Berlin’s U-Bahn, but the rule is seldom enforced (see also no. 10. The Real Musician), and a steady stream of hopefuls travel up and down most lines every day.

The Sweet Homeless Man has been a fixture on the U8 for years, accompanied by a pungently sweet smell as he staggers through the moving carriage on crutches. One foot is encased in a massive grimy cast.

The musky smell is thicker and sweeter than honey and causes noses to wrinkle involuntarily, but, after all, it can only be a richly sweaty sock, and one day the cast will come off and he can wash it.

Until one day he reveals that the smell comes from the gangrene eating his toes, and for years passengers have therefore been inhaling the particles of his rotting feet.

  1. Mister Berlin.

Occurrence: Constant/Any time

Mister Berlin (not Herr Berlin, not Mr Berlin) views everything and everyone on the U-Bahn with a look of tolerant disdain, which stems from the fact that he was born in Berlin. The U-Bahn is therefore his by birthright and it amuses him to let others use it.

Anyone foolish enough to engage the red-faced and leisure-weared Mister Berlin in conversation will discover that his voice has one setting: loud.

He offers his opinions freely, though only passengers skilled in cutting through the thick vegetation of Berlin’s buzz saw accent will understand their meaning.

  1. Schulietta Mädchen.

Occurrence: Irregular/Early mornings

Morning commutes in Berlin are always at risk of being interrupted by marauding packs of ten-year-olds on a school outing. U-Bahn carriages, which were previously full of the strained silence of people strenuously ignoring each other, suddenly morph into noisy fried food-smelling commuter cages.

Berliners rarely like children (until they grow old enough to hold a useful picket at demonstrations), but nobody has told the children this.

In their happy ignorance, they kick other passengers’ knees as they jump up and down, or swap seats with each other.They pick their noses or block the doors with psychedelically coloured backpacks more suitable for the Love Parade.

But as bad as they are, these are normal children.

Then Schulietta sits down.

Alone among her fellows, she is quiet. She sits properly in her seat and does not require the teacher to keep explaining why Paul is wearing a green jacket, when he usually wears a blue one.

(Paul is wearing a green jacket because he lost his blue one at the museum, although he didn’t tell anyone at the time. He simply took a blue one, which he found. When the teacher asked, he confessed to not being able to remember what colour jacket he had put on that morning until they made it onto the train, at which point his classmates’ questions reminded him.)

While everyone else is staring and pointing at Paul and his new green jacket, Schulietta is only interested in you.

For the distance of five solid stops, she stares at you without blinking, then starts turning her head slowly to the window, but without releasing your blushing face from her gaze, hoping you will be tricked into acknowledging her.

Her stare gives you a headache on the top of your head as you attempt to continue reading. The need to move your head from under it, together with the reasonable conviction that surely her eyes can’t be as big as they feel, are almost too much to resist.

She smells of chewing gum, unless it’s her shampoo, and the synthetic smell is creeping up your nostrils, pushing the headache down into your back teeth.

What is wrong with your face, that she keeps staring at it like this? Did you cut yourself while shaving? Perhaps you sliced right through your jugular and are dead.

After several stops, you wonder if Schulietta is dead. Perhaps the school’s classroom was built on an old grave Prussian grave?

Perhaps the green jacket belonged to Schulietta, and Paul killed her to get it.

None of the other children pay her any attention, and your attempts to catch the teacher’s eye have earned you nothing more than suspicious glares.

Just don’t look at her, you tell yourself. Don’t look or she’ll bore through your eyes and dig into your brain.

You clench your fists hard enough to draw blood from your palms as the force of her black hole stare presses on your scalp.

You want nothing more than to get off the train, but somehow know that if you leave before the class does, then she’ll belong to you.

  1. Herr Wurst.

Occurrence: Rare/Afternoons

You continue reading your book as the seat across the aisle from you is taken. It is Herr Wurst, but you do not yet realise this.

Out of the corner of your eye, you noticed bobbed red hair and a short leather skirt, with a grey face and a chunky woollen yellow sweater between them.

Ah, you think. A woman has sat down opposite me. Fine.

As soon as the train starts moving, the person spreads their legs.

Their skirt is short, and they are sitting opposite you, and your eye is drawn inexorably to some incongruous detail.

Turning the page of your book—and knowing full well you shouldn’t—you risk the tiniest glance. In that infinitesimal moment, Frau Wurst turns into Herr Wurst, as that most telltale detail has slipped out from behind Herr Wurst’s panties to wink rakishly at you with its good eye.

  1. Frau Alt-Schmidt.

Occurrence: Constant/Early morning to mid-evening.

In fact, you will most likely not see Frau Alt-Schmidt, as she has discovered a way to make herself invisible while in transit.

On occasion, she can be spotted at the exit to the U-Bahn, making her slow and painful progress up the stairs to the exit, at which point you remember she exists.

  1. Alan Party-Ridge.

Occurrence: Regular/Late evenings

Alan is English, here to party, and doesn’t care who knows it.

Hey, he didn’t lose a war!

Used to the UK’s licencing hours, he’s conspicuously nursing that first beer on his way to the awful club he’s chosen for the night.

What makes him most conspicuous, however, is how ridiculously underdressed he is. Even in the middle of winter, he won’t put on a jacket in case it creases his favourite Top Shop shirt.

  1. The Lonely Goth.

Occurrence: Irregular/Night time.

Standing in the corner furthest away from Alan is the carriage’s only goth.

Painfully introverted, the lonely goth has found the least judgmental piece of panelling in the entire carriage and is trying not to stare too hard at it, in case it starts staring back.

The intensity of the goth’s self-consciousness snags everyone’s attention, most of whom are wondering if the goth is truly unaware that black just isn’t his colour, and if there’s a good reason why his hair has to be so greasy and limp.

But nobody will tell this to the goth, who—like the vampires he admires—cannot look in mirrors and it is only the thought that he will soon be back in a pitch-black club, or bedroom, that is keeping him going.

  1. The Real Musician.

Occurrence: Daily/All day.

A species of busker who wants you to know they are not in it for the money.

They do this by playing an entire song (bloody “Hallelujah” with an extra helping of yearning, if you’re really unlucky) rather than only playing until the next stop, despite the fact that everyone knows buskers are paid to go away, and perfectly good, proper music is being wasted on dozens of headphones while The Real Musician wrings every bit of juice out of each Hallelujah.

(If you are in this situation, just remember that it only lasts four minutes—or six for the “full Buckley.” It only feels like forever.)

10 WTF Film Flops.

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A man looks at an art piece in a museum, consisting of three neon question marks.
Made with photos by Pim Chu and Simone Secci on Unsplash

In probably the final Killer List for this year, we take a closer look at the films that no one wanted to see. From next week I’ll be posting my “stories” again. Sorry!

1. Titanic 2. For whatever reason, audiences weren’t interested in this sumptuous sequel in which the ship was raised from the ocean floor, only to sink again on its journey back home. We say: “When you got no plot, you got nothing to lose.”

2. The M&M M&Movie. Whether it was the lacklustre screenplay, or the on-brand, but hard-to-read title, the candy-coated duo were unable to parlay their small screen success into Hollywood m&magic. We say: “Success that melts on your screen, and not in your Cannes.”

3. The first film in the proposed Spielberg Cinematic Universe was also the last. Audiences said a resounding “no” to Schindler’s Duel about a man taking an express elevator to the ground floor of a very tall building while being chased around the elevator by another man on a Segway, whom he has somehow annoyed. We say: “Just… just cut it out, okay?”

4. Shortbeth attempted to update “the Scottish play” for Gen Y with actors ad-libbing whatever random nonsense happened to be passing through their minds, instead of delivering Shakespeare’s original lines. We say: “Is this a bunch of crap I see before me?”

5. After failing to get his party’s nomination to run in the 2024 presidential election, Donald Trump bullied people with loose Hollywood connections until enough of them agreed to help him remake the “definitive” version of Home Alone. Trump had a tiny cameo in the original film, which he claims was all that was left of a “really quite big. Big. Really big. Nice and big. Nice. Big.” role originally. In the new version, fittingly — and unironically — titled Trump Alone, Donald reprises the role originally played by Macaulay Culkin. We say: “You’re what the French call, ‘les incompétents.’”

6. The Godfather IV: The Godson. In this “disaster” movie, Marlon Brando played the roles of godfather and godson. His famous line: “Goo, goo, capiche?” remains the most cited movie quotes of all time. We say: “So, I made the film then asked God for forgiveness.”

7. In Jason Statham’s Phantom of the Opera, the popular hero-next-door actor reprises his usual Mr Nice Guy role before suddenly starting to kidnap girls from his lair under a Paris opera house. The film is most often described simply as “weird.” We say: “You are crying! You are afraid of me! And yet I am not really wicked.”

8. Speaking of weird… Lars von Trier’s new filmmaker’s manifesto requires all films to be made “only by the director, alone, in a locked room. I will mind the keys and let them out when I feel the film is ready.” It has been variously described as “weird,” “the death of Danish cinema” by that country’s Dagblad, and “a really great and funny idea” by Lars von Trier.

9. Moonlighting. As nostalgia for the 80s peaked, the time seemed right for a movie reboot of the popular TV series which starred Bruce Willis and Cybill Shepherd. The movie bombed as audiences confused Moonlighting with 1987 film Moonstruck, which starred Cher, and were put off by the idea of a film where “Cher” (Bruce Willis) mumbles and wears a wife-beater. We say: “Snap out of it!”

10. The Teletubbies Towering Inferno. The Artists Formerly Known As The Teletubbies (AFKATT) have long since recognised that this film may have been a mistake commercially, but claim to remain grateful to it for helping them to break out of children’s television.

Dipsy is currently making a “dark musical” with James Franco. The other members of the troupe remain on “hiatus.”

Despite the film flopping, it incurred only moderate financial losses for the studio, as it had been filmed in the tower Spielberg had built for Schindler’s Duel. We say: “Time for Tubby bye-bye!”

In other news: there’s a brand-new magazine of short speculative fiction coming!

Verity Holloway is Kickstarting Cloister Fox, and Robert Shearman (among others) has contributed a short story to the first issue :O.

Support it here!

10 Pop Songs You Didn’t Know Praised Satan

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The Devil sings into a microphone
Made with photos by Alessio Zaccaria and Keagan Henman on Unsplash

With the holidays approaching (far too) fast, there’s cheerful bloody music everywhere. This week, I attempted to find refuge with the Devil, who famously has all the best tunes, only to discover that he’s responsible for some absolute stinkers, too.

1. “The Sun Ain’t Gonna Shine Anymore” by Frankie Valli. Wearing the blue cloak of the Devil’s emissary goat, Azazel, Frankie explains to his victim that the blood sacrifice is necessary so that Satan will continue to allow the sun to shine and the moon to rise. The song enjoyed greater success in the version recorded by The Walker Brothers.

2. “Blue Suede Shoes” by Carl Perkins. Now better known as an Elvis Presley track, this song was originally written and performed by Carl Perkins, who also invokes Azazel with his use of the word “blue,” but goes further, connecting it with “suede,” a common codeword for “human skin” among devil-worshippers. In this song, Perkins informs us that he is happy to suffer any persecution his religious beliefs might bring, as long as his sacrificial victims remain undefiled.

3. “Metal Mickey” by Suede. The band fronted by Brett Anderson put their predilection for slaughtering innocents in Satan’s name right into their moniker. “Metal Mickey” is, of course, the name the singer gave to his ritual knife. Brett is most famous in satanic circles for his cryptic quote: “I don’t care whether my victim is a man or woman, as long as it’s a woman.”

4. “Milkshake” by Kelis. The clue that there is more to this song than a first listen might reveal is the injunction to “warm it up.” Obviously, nobody would ever warm up a milkshake. This must therefore be a reference to the fires of Hell which burn ever brighter as worshippers make their way to “the yard”: the black mass.

5. “Easy Lover” by Philip Bailey. She’ll take your heart when you’re on your knees? Sounds like Satan to me. This 1984 hit, which Bailey sung with Phil Collins, has been praised for its progressive use of the pronouns “she/her” to refer to Satan.

6. “Like A Virgin” by Madonna. In this catchy how-to song for beginners, Madonna explains the Dark Lord’s preference regarding his (or her) victims.

7. “What Is Love” by Haddaway. Trinidadian–German philosopher – and singer – Haddaway uses interrogative, almost epiplectically rhetorical lyrics to force us into confrontation with our beliefs. What, demands Haddaway, has love brought us other than pain? The conclusion, which the song cleverly leaves unformulated in order for the listener to reach it for themselves, is that we might as well try hate for a change.

8. “Old Town Road” by Lil Nas X, one of the Church of Cthulhu’s most famous adherents, the song describes how X found his way to the “Old Town” (where Lovecraft’s Old Ones live) through the use of “horse” (heroin).

9. “Hand In My Pocket” by Alanis Morissette. Alanis describes the superficially carefree life of a Satanist, hinting slyly at an undercurrent of simmering resentment as she is forced to perform everyday tasks one-handedly, in other words, unable to give the sign of the horns.

10. “Mull of Kintyre” by Wings. Sometimes referred to as the “fifth Beatle,” Wings only revealed that the song was dedicated to a “close friend,” when he originally released it. I can now confirm that the friend was the Devil. The song’s title is an anagram of “For Inky Mullet,” and Wings wrote it to poke gentle fun at his friend’s poor taste in haircuts and frugal ways, which extended to using cheap substitute for hair dye, when they were young men “on the pull” in Liverpool. Also, it’s got bagpipes in it. Evil.

In other news this week: tomorrow is the final Bandcamp Friday of 2021, with no news yet whether Bandcamp plans to extend the fee-waiving days into 2022. So get your devil-worshipping tunes tomorrow!

I’ll be pre-ordering Zeal & Ardor’s third album, Zeal & Ardor, which already sounds like a strong contender for 2022’s best suck-up-to-Satan music.

I’ll also be pre-ordering Thank’s, [sic, that’s not a typo] Thoughtless Cruelty, an unholy cacophony guaranteed to harrow the souls of any unshriven dead you might have lying around (or at least annoy the neighbours).

Top 10 Haunted Summer Camps

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A "campsite" sign pointing to what looks like gravestaones.
Made with photos by DDP and Bailey Anselme on Unsplash

If you enjoyed Netflix’s Fear Street series, you might be interested in more summer camp stories. Bookings open now for next year! For every year! Forever…

1. Camp Ararat is the site of countless visions, but few deaths. The most common vision is that of a man who waits at the door of the camp’s outhouse all night. Passing through the ghost leaves a black residue on the person’s skin.

2. Camp Yeller no longer opens during leap years, after campers were found dead in their beds – drowned – on leap years.

3. Camp Bearclaw continues to open, but its visitors are now mostly ghost hunters hoping to catch a vision of the 1942 massacre when an alligator attacked, eating 28 campers and supervisors. The rumour that the giant alligator still lives and could return to Camp Bearclaw is an added attraction for thrill seekers.

4. Camp Pheasant, on the other hand, never recovered from the attack that happened there. The area continues to experience an abnormally high number of disappearances, leading to rumours that the perpetrator, the infamous Dean West, continues to return to the area for victims, despite having been shot to death while attempting to escape police. Electronic equipment does not work at Camp Pheasant.

5. Since being burned down, Camp Oldham allegedly returns for one day every year, with reports of lights, screams and the smell of smoke where the camp was located.

6. Camp Rock Edge is still open for business, run by the original religious group. It is strongly recommended that anyone intending to travel to Camp Rock Edge wait to receive confirmation that they are expected before going. Local feeling still runs high and the group will shoot first and ask questions later.

The exact details of what happened remain disputed. The group claims that the children who attended in 1984 volunteered to dedicate their lives to Jesus, renouncing the outside world and their parents. Families of the children say they picked up their children on the last day, only to have them disappear “like smoke” from their cars on the way home.

A comparison of photos shows the same cult members – barely aged – still running the camp today.

7. Camp Woodwish is the locus for numerous hauntings involving a boy calling for help, who lures hikers and dog walkers ever further into the treacherous woods. Locals presume this is Tim Eldon, who got lost in a game of Hide and Seek in 1911.

8. Camp Malcolm was Missouri’s first racially integrated summer camp. After their horrific attack on it, the membership of the regional Ku Klux Klan went into sharp decline. Sheer disgust at their actions made it difficult for them to recruit new members, while existing members mysteriously disappeared. Even today, bloody handprints appear on the houses of Ku Klux Klan family members.

9. The bus which crashed on the way to camp in Wichita returns throughout the summer months each year. Motorists report following a bus of happy children, who often make faces or otherwise tease them through the bus’s rear window, before it abruptly vanishes at the hairpin turn, which was the site of the original crash.

10. The drowned bodies of the campers from Camp Aloha rise from the lake every year during the August full moon. The figures stand in the waist high water all night, before sinking back into the mud by morning. An attempt to free them by draining the lake revealed the lake bed had been seeded with several hundred bear traps. The perpetrator is still at large.

I’ve heard back from readers praising/complaining that the short story in last weekend’s newsletter was very creepy. You’ve missed it unfortunately, but it’s not too late to get signed up for the next one. Signing up also gets you two EXCLUSIVE ebooks. Click here to kumbaya-nd* join us round the newsletter campfire!

* “come by and”. Sorry.

10 Infamous Pets

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Made with photos from Pavel Churiumov and Sonika Agarwal on Unsplash

This week’s killer list is a closer look at the darker side of the human-animal relationship. Enjoy!

1. Caligula’s horse. After being appointed to the Senate, this animal became the first proponent of the theory we now know as “trickle-down economics” before a financial scandal forced him to retire.

2. Van Gogh’s duck. Because the artist was convinced the duck was lucky, he agreed to all of its demands, including the drunken request that Van Gogh pay it the tribute of an ear.

3. Poker ace Derek Barlow’s dogs. After he taught them the basics of poker, Derek became convinced that his dogs were concocting a sinister plan. He photographed and painted them obsessively in order to work out the “code” by which they worked out the details of this plan.

4. The princess’s frog. After meeting in a wood, the princess and her frog enjoyed a whirlwind romance, culminating in marriage. The rumours that the frog turned back into a man were not true, but were put about by courtiers attempting to protect the princess from the court priests, whose powers were in the ascendant at the time. The Princess seldom left her chambers after the marriage, but when she did, she was usually green. She died of suffocation, from too liberal an application of green paint over her entire skin. It is now assumed that the frog was a member of the Bufonidae family, and that the princess spent her last months in a hallucinatory state.

5. The red deer stag pictured on the front of the Irish one pound coin (before the currency switched to Euro) was from a herd of deer which roamed freely through Dublin’s Phoenix Park. On the occasion of Lady Gregory’s visit to Dublin for the opening of her play in the Abbey Theatre in 1904, she was taking a stroll through the Phoenix Park when she was accosted by a group of men of ruffianly aspect. The stage snuck up behind them and bellowed, startling the men and giving Lady Gregory time to escape. For this act it was honoured with a place on Irish currency.

It features on this list of infamous pets as research has since revealed that the stag was in fact two soldiers in a deer costume, who were attempting to molest red deer hinds.

6. McCormick’s pig. McCormick was Ireland’s most famous butcher, even supplying the Irish president himself with pork. The pork came from McCormick’s prize pig, which sliced the meat from its own living body. It is infamous because its vaunted power of regeneration came from a steady diet of human children.

7. Gandhi’s elephant. The famous pacifist was forced to give his pet away after it developed the distressing habit of slapping people in the face while its owner was talking to them.

8. Dracula’s bat is responsible for the belief that vampires can turn themselves into bats. Vampires can shrink themselves to the size of a Capuchin monkey’s thumb, but cannot change shape. Dracula devised the strategy of training his bat to sleep hanging off the back of his cape. At the first sign of danger, Dracula would shrink. The bat, woken by the sense of falling, would awaken and fly away, thus creating the illusion that Dracula had “transformed.”

9. Italian dictator Mussolini had a pet brick to which he was greatly attached, and which he named “Litle Benito.” This is the origin of the common saying that if you want a reasonable, intelligent answer you should “ask little Benny,” as it was understood among Mussolini’s entourage that the brick was the more intelligent and well-balanced of the two.

10. The Queen’s swans. It is well known that swans on the Thames belong to the Queen. It is less well-known that each swan represents a year of the Queen’s life. On her birthday the previous year is decanted into a fresh swan in a painful process which the sovereign undergoes with the aim of distributing her quintessential Englishness throughout the country.

The “infamous” swans are the Anni horribilis 1981, 1992 and 1997.

In other news: Tomorrow, Friday the 19th of November, Richard Cheese (“America’s Loudest Lounge Singer”) will be performing his first ever livestream concert! Regardless of what you thought about the rest of the film, there’s no doubt that Richard’s “Viva Las Vegas” was the best bit of Army of the Dead, so you know I’ll be shaking – but not stirring – my booty to Richard Cheese this Friday. Get your tickets here!

10 Ways To Die At Work.

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A blood spattered desk with note book, coffee cup and laptop
Made with Photo by Oli Dale on Unsplash and Photo by Alexandre Boucey on Unsplash

Here are ten things they won’t tell you about on your first day…

1. Getting trapped for a week in the supply room with Andrew from Marketing. He’s a tool, but he’s also bigger than you, and you don’t like the way he stares at your legs and belly even before the paper and ink supplies run out.

2. The stress of an upcoming deadline makes you drink more and more of the awful cheap coffee from the office’s machine, which makes you more stressed, which in turn sends you more frequently back to the coffee machine, until your heart hurts so much that you are sure you are suffering a massive coronary and die from psychosomatic heart failure.

3. You stay late after work to meet a client, not realising your boss has also stayed back to keep an eye on you. When you close thea deal with the client, your boss congratulates you as you wait for the lift. Not knowing he was there, you get a fright, stumble and fall, catching your skull on the corner of a hideous flower pot with a fake plant. Your boss is forced to make an emergency late night call to Andrew to “swallow the evidence.”

4. You take the office elevator to a meeting on the top floor: you aren’t wearing your sports tracker, so it would be a “waste” to take the stairs. The lift gets stuck between floors. After 24 hours of being assured that help is on its way, you climb through the lift’s emergency hatch in the ceiling. From there you can easily reach the floor above you. The doors aren’t even fully closed! As you move towards them, you hear movement behind you: Andrew’s face, his lips still blue from the pen ink he drank, grins at you.

5. You buy a cake to share with your colleagues as it’s your birthday. The cake looks nice, and really big, covered in a thick layer of creamy gunk. A bee fell into the gunk while the baker was making it, and has been struggling to swim out of the hideously sweet “creme” for hours. She makes it to the surface just as you bite into a slice and you die of anaphylactic shock.

6. As a practical joke, Andrew (he’s a tool, remember?) has piled up all the photocopy machines into an “office Jenga” tower. When Marie from Health and Safety bends over to check they are unplugged, she bumps into you, knockig you into the tower. The tower falls on you, crushing your skull.

7. Poor customer service sends a man who was already desperate for some attention to go on a shooting spree at your office.

8. The barman where you are celebrating the office Christmas party has been eating nuts. When you order a beer, he pours it, without having washed his hands, holding the glass by the rim. Your body goes into anaphylactic shock because of your nut allergy.

9. A brief, violent gust of wind sends paper flying everywhere as you pass the stationery cupboard. You die of blood loss caused by a ridiculous number of paper cuts.

10. Andrew always reads your diary when you go on lunch break. Having read this list, he decides that – like him – you never recovered from being rescued from the supply room. He calls aournd after work with a bottle of wine, an axe, and a large appetite.

This week I finished the second book in the Withes of Woodville series by Mark Stay, Babes in the Wood. If you’re jonesing for some feel-good fantasy (while I finish off the next Alumière Sisters adventure, for example…), then check it out here!