Imprint
- Sceptre
California, Modern & contemporary fiction (post c 1945), Horror & ghost stories, Science fiction, Short stories
Kate Folk's debut short story collection Out There is a genre-bending look at the human response to the voids in life; internal and external, literal and metaphorical.
'Extraordinary . . . Folk is a dazzling talent' Karen Joy Fowler
'Wonderfully weird' Daily Mail
A woman uses dating apps to find a partner, despite the threat posed by 'blots', artificial men more interested in stealing data than dating. A sculptor, trapped in a skyscraper restaurant when a violent coup erupts below, creates a perfect model of the town as it is destroyed. A curtain of void obliterates the world at a steady pace, leaving one woman to decide with whom she wants to spend eternity.
Haunting and darkly inventive, the stories in Out There deftly combine science fiction and horror to uncover an unforgettable vision of the absurdity of life in the digital age.
'The literary love child of Kafka and Camus and Bradbury penning episodes of Black Mirror' Chang-Rae Lee, author of Native Speaker
Praise for Out There: Stories
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Out There is for readers who consider body horror to be a love language. True romantics will swoon either despite or because of the gore that accompanies these sharp, affable stories . . . Folk's stories have been compared to Shirley Jackson's, and this is most apparent in the way Folk balances her horror with humour. - New York Times Book Review
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Kate Folk's short stories are wonderfully weird; playfully pushing the possibilities of plotlines towards the uncanny, creepy and off-kilter, they have a seam of dark humour that illuminates the grotesquery with an unnerving beauty - Daily Mail
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A wonderful absurdist collection that explores the vagaries of human connections - Publishers Weekly (starred review)
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Tightly constructed and spectacularly mind-bending stories that ingeniously pair everyday challenges and outlandish predicaments, ranging from hilarious to terrifying. Folk writes with unnerving matter-of-factness as she veers into Poe- and Shirley Jackson-like horror or turns to the poignantly fantastic in the mode of George Saunders or Kelly Link. - Booklist (starred review)
Kate Folk
Kate Folk is the author of the short story collection Out There. She has written for publications including The New Yorker, New York Times Magazine, Granta, McSweeney's, and Zyzzyva. She's received support from the Headlands Center for the Arts, MacDowell, the Vermont Studio Center, and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. Recently, she was a Wallace Stegner Fellow in fiction at Stanford University. She lives in San Francisco.
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