Description
Nicholas Royle’s stories are “immaculately sinister” according to Olivia Laing in The Time Literary Supplement, while Phil Baker, in The Sunday Times, described Royle as “a real craftsman of disquiet”.
In his third collection, The Dummy and Other Uncanny Stories, Royle focuses on archetypes and phenomena that, through their particular melding of the familiar and the unfamiliar, produce uneasy or uncanny effects. In these stories he writes about doppelgangers, ghosts, dummies, disconnected body parts, impaired vision, the dead and the prospect of death, not without a macabre sense of humour.
These stories reflect Royle’s continuing development as an exponent of the form, in which he is always seeking to learn and to grow and to push against boundaries.