Welcoming Sara Larner

Flame Tree Press welcomes author and screenwriter Sara Larner to the blog to talk about their short story “A Note for William Cowper”, 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, Sara Larner shares an excerpt from their story along with a short glimpse into their inspiration.

Excerpt:

3:12:2047 23:22

All the lights inside the sub went out. You should know. I have the light from the camera outside, and that reflects in a bit, but it’s pointed away. All I have is darkness in here.

If I were smarter, I’d write poetry. I used to, when I was a kid, but even then I was terrified of improv. I needed so much time to obsess over every terrible line. I’d write it out and mark the stresses like they teach you, and feel like I was a part of something bigger than myself. Then life happened. I was never a part of anything. The grand tradition of literary success has nothing to do with me. I was like a sports fan, dressed up in the jersey and maybe even holding a football or some shit, jumping up and down thinking I was winning the world series because the guys I loved did good.

But if I was smarter, I’d compose something on the spot. Without paper or anything. I have time. I have imminent death.

Oh! Outside! I saw something!

Larner writes:

“Raised in an aggressively atheist Jewish household, I never had prayers. Flying by myself at eight years old, when we hit turbulence, I didn’t pray – I recited poetry. It calmed me down. I felt steadied, reassured by the rhythm of the words. More than a decade later, hospitalized due to insomnia, half-delusional with my grand total of eleven hours of sleep spread over nine days, none of which had been in the past 30 or so hours – I recited poetry. 

I wrote this intending to explore how poetry can be both a balm and a companion to madness.”

As well as Larner’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

Sara Larner (they/she) is a screenwriter and novelist based out of Los Angeles, where they live with their cat, a lemon tree named AgaLemnon, a fig tree named Figmalion, and a small horde of books. They write predominantly young adult fantasy, with frequent dalliances in horror. When not writing, they spend their time painting, losing to one of their partners at Magic: The Gathering, talking superheroes with their other partner, and trying to mediate the war between their cat and all of the houseplants.

This Way Lies Madness is out September 9th 2025: Pre-Order Now