Our Lady of Darkness has been with us since the beginning. She exists in the places other gods forget, comforting the afflicted and afflicting the comfortable. For Thomas De Quincey, writing in 1845, she was a creature of terror, but here she is redrawn – a figure of fear for some, of comfort and protection to others.

David Frankel’s sharp, alluring fragments read like reports from a disturbing world that, with gradual alarm, we realize is the same one we’re standing in. In these eerie commentaries, we feel flashes of Borges’ Labyrinths and Ballard’s Atrocity Exhibition, though neither can fully prepare us for what we are about to experience. Dark-ravaged, ecclesiastical, rain-lashed, these are stories from a reality that before we glimpsed only in the corner of our eye, but now grows bigger, closer, presses in on us, urgently, with fervour. - Ashley Stokes, author of Gigantic

In short pieces full of vivid images, David Frankel goes out into the derelict edgelands of our messed-up society and encounters a strange, forlorn beauty in those places that defy the advertisers and financiers. ‘The tranquillity of negation,’ he calls what he finds there, in that zone of dread and grace, where the overlooked inhabitants find consolation in oblivion. A brief, marvellous, haunting book, reminiscent of Sebald and Sinclair. - David Swann, author of Season of Bright Sorrow

30pp