Welcoming Georgina Bruce
Flame Tree Press welcomes British Fantasy Award-winning author Georgina Bruce to the blog to talk about her short story “The Book of Dreems”, which appears alongside a stellar line-up in the groundbreaking anthology This Way Lies Madness, releasing in September from Flame Tree Press in our Beyond & Within series. In the introduction to the work, the book’s co-editors, Dave Jeffery and Lee Murray, say the anthology “defies convention by bringing together authentic, sensitive portrayals of mental illness in a genre that has notoriously lacked such tenets.” Comprising 23 stories and poems, the book also includes accompanying vignettes offering insight into the authors’ motivation for their work.
Today, Georgina Bruce shares an excerpt from her story along with a short glimpse into her inspiration.
Excerpt:
Fraser said, the doctor said, everyone said – there was no dog. If there’d been a dog, it must have run away. The doctor told her strange things happen to brains when they black out. She explained it all in a calm voice. There’s no damage, she said. It’s common not to remember a traumatic event, the brain’s way of protecting you. It’s a good thing. You don’t have to worry.
Yet there was an absence. A dark matter. A black hole with its chaotic corona, an event horizon over which tumbled thoughts and memories and intentions, if they drifted too close, got caught in its gravitational pull. When Kate tried to think about the accident, to imagine, to edge her thoughts towards that black lake, she lost herself horribly. She forgot. She sensed herself dissolving into the thick inky void, and was afraid.
Bruce writes:
“This story is one of several I wrote about the Dreemy Peeple: women and girls who have been turned into perfect dolls for men to play with. In “The Book of Dreems”, Kate is literally dehumanised by Fraser, who makes these Dreemy Peeple dolls. I wanted to write about the labyrinth inside Kate’s mind, how she comes to be trapped, and what great strength and sacrifice it takes to free herself. On the one hand, it’s a fairytale – Bluebeard, with his rules and his key and his room full of dead wives. On the other hand, it’s a classic science fiction story in the sense that it takes a current societal preoccupation – in this case, body modification – and projects it into a future where technology can deliver it to an extreme.”
As well as Bruce’s story, Murray and Jeffery invite readers of This Way Lies Madness to discover “tales of trauma, dissociation, body dysmorphia, psychosis, depression, anxiety, and more, captured in all forms of horror from the extreme to the nuanced. There is jaw-dropping violence, skin-crawling body horror, and quirky dark humour, alongside the quiet, heartbreaking introspections of people spiralling into madness. Yet all the stories and poems in this volume are framed so that the insensitive, stereotypical presentations of mental illness commonly found in horror are resoundingly and appropriately absent.”
"A mesmerizing and remarkably ambitious mosaic of delicate minds possessed, of spoiled and haunted hearts, of gaping wounds both seen and unseen. This Way Lies Madness weaves a beguiling and profoundly revealing tapestry of psychological terror with such nuance and depth in each collected story." – Eric LaRocca, author of Things Have Gotten Worse Since We Last Spoke
This Way Lies Madness is out September 9th 2025: Pre-Order Now
