Two men, one of whom is sleeping with the other's wife, hunt the elusive Scottish wild cat. A series of canal drownings is revealed through crossword clues and postcards of paintings by Walter Sickert. A young man finds himself drawn into the auto-erotic asphyxiation fantasies of his deceased uncle.

A collection of short stories from the period 1990 to 2006. The contents reflect the diverse range of publications - from national newspapers to horror anthologies, literary magazines to cult websites - in which the stories first appeared. One story, 'The Churring', was written specially and appears in this collection for the first time.


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'Immaculately sinister'
Olivia Laing, Times Literary Supplement



'Just beautiful'
Katy Guest, Independent



'A collection of his short stories dating back as far as 1990, Mortality finds Nicholas Royle returning to familiar psychic territory, much as his obsessive, weird or lonely characters are often compelled to do. We see that he's been writing about films, art, photography and memories, remembered affairs and missed opportunities, sex, desire and obsession, killings, suicides and open verdicts, psychogeography, abandoned buildings, hidden lives, ghosts and doppelgängers for a long time now.
    One of these stories was either an outtake or a rehearsal for his snuff-movie thrillers The Director's Cut and Antwerp. Other lines or images are so typical you wouldn't be surprised to find he's since reused them. In "Nine Years", for example, a man has looked up a woman he once nearly had sex with nine years ago. Standing at her window at night, looking at the railway lines below, the yellow windows of a passing train "judder unsteadily like frames of film in the gate of an old projector". With that one line, other people's lives are made as alluring and unobtainable as images on celluloid, and the man watching them pass by becomes a lonely voyeur.
    The short story form, just made for the cunning twist in the tale, but which also encourages writers to create enigmas, to be subtle and allusive, and leave things unsaid or hanging in the air, is well suited to Royle, and he to it. He makes the ordinary seem spooky and the uncanny seem believable. For a collection of recycled material, it's pretty impressive'
Laurence Phelan, Independent on Sunday



'He writes about hurried meals in mediocre restaurants and dangerous driving on urban dual carriageways. He is a miserablist kept away from unbecoming preciousness by early exposure to the Pan Books of Horror. He knows a lot about the making of low-budget films and the pubs where people listen to bands who might have been promising once, and about bad relationships that include mildly unusual preferences. From all of these, he makes something unexpected, a sense of what it is to be human and fallible and to be in constant mild emotional pain. Nicholas Royle is so accomplished a novelist of the uncanny and messed-up that it was never going to be necessarily the case that his short stories would be as good as they are. Sometimes the short stories of novelists feel like broken biscuits - fragments of ideas and plots that did not quite work - just as the novels of short story writers can rabbit on for pages without incidents metamorphosing into that solid thing we call a plot. Royle, though, has a pronounced sense of what he writes about - blokey men getting themselves into rather more trouble even than they deserve. And the length is right every time. He writes well about other cities - his Amsterdam is one in which psychic vampires will get you - but he is first and foremost a writer with a sense of London, the London most of us live in, of late-night tube journeys that seem routinely menacing. His appeal to the senses is not always sensually pleasant - you can smell the rain on the wind in his stories, or feel on your skin the grease of bad café food. The stories are best read one at a time (because they are disturbing). At the same time, they cohere beautifully: they share a tone, a way of seeing'
Roz Kaveney, Time Out



'Menacing and uncanny, Nicholas Royle's short stories are brief experimental vignettes of horror and seedy nastiness. Written over the past decade or so, the pieces that make up Mortality consider the human body and its various weaknesses with the eye of a mortician. Indeed, one of the voices in the penultimate story is that of a morgue worker, whose slight reserve and matter-of-factness about corporeality is a keynote for the volume as a whole. The stories take in sex, redemption, art, photography, adultery, taxidermy, music, tattooing, illness, film and urban exploration, while effortlessly shifting persona and setting. The modern world is considered in all its mewling, puking horror. Though Royle often writes in the first person, there is a cold, anatomising, objective intelligence at work here; an intentionally alienating flatness of tone. However, the emotional centre of the collection is a new story, "The Churring", an enigmatic and resonant piece of writing that suggests a maturing of Royle's voice; its power derives both from the story itself and the contrast with the grim events narrated elsewhere'
Jerome de Groot, Guardian



'[A] sort of sideways shift is apparent in quite a few of the stories in this collection, establishing a mood of psychological stress or alienaton that switches, like a carefully sprung trap, into a glimpse of the nastier or self-destructive aspects of the human psyche: the horrific, though logically followed through consequence of the induced red-green colour blindness in "Negatives" or the equally Ballardian endings of "Auteur" and "Buxton, Texas"... At his best (as with "The Churring", "Skin Deep", "The Comfort of Stranglers") Royle can induce a mood of horrified fascination, where you almost dread what's coming but can't avoid turning the page'
Stuart Jeffery, Interzone



'A writer finding new ways to incorporate magic realism into a contemporary urban landscape... An admirable ambition to cover a range of short story genres including crime, gritty realism and science fiction... What Royle does well is take us into the mind of the male, forty-something, university-educated psyche... He's right about Pizza Express. It is the only decent pizza chain in the country'
Michael Stewart, Aesthetica


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