Lusk local Katie Seaver may be only 16, but the budding novelist has already stepped into the literary world after publishing her first ever book: The Melancholia of the Grotesque.

The book is a gothic horror short story collection centred around women killing people, eating people, and losing sense of reality. These stories are atmospheric, woefully written pieces on solitude, girlhood, existentialism, derealisation and misery. They detail the journeys of different women, all isolated and miserable in their own ways as they navigate the utter horrors that occur both in their bodies and in their minds.

Described on www.goodreads.com, as ‘The Melancholia of the Grotesque explores philosophical ideas about identity and women’s place in the world, while detailing gruesome scenes of body horror and excruciating feelings of solitude. This collection contains 20 short stories written by Irish author Katie Seaver, with influences such as Bram Stoker, Franz Kafka, Edgar Allen Poe, Mary Shelley, Albert Camus, Julia Armfield, Sayaka Murata, Mieko Kawakami, Vladimir Nabokov, Simone de Beauvoir, Junji Ito, Clarice Lispector and Oscar Wilde.

“I feel my soul slipping away from the only vessel I possess that connects me to this world. I am living in a hell of my own making, forced to relive my own lonesome life forever.”

The Melancholia of the Grotesque is available for download on amazon.com and on goodreads.com.