In her debut short story collection, Myths & Monsters, Emma Steel takes the familiar scaffolding of fairy tales, folklore, and myth and dismantles it from the inside out. From a darkly reimagined Pinocchio haunting the Black Forest to a tooth fairy whose ambition curdles into something grotesque, Steel's stories inhabit the space where the whimsical and the deeply unsettling collide. Divided into two sections, Myths and Monsters, the collection asks a pointed question: what separates the legendary from the monstrous, the story we tell ourselves from the truth lurking beneath it?

Steel's prose is precise and atmospheric, conjuring worlds that feel at once ancient and utterly contemporary. Her characters, whether mythological creatures navigating workplace politics or gods adrift in a modern world, are driven by achingly human desires: the hunger for recognition, the weight of legacy, the cost of ambition unchecked. Myths & Monsters marks the arrival of a bold and original storytelling voice, one that finds new darkness in old stories and new meaning in the shadows we've always been afraid to examine too closely.