Neurotic Literature

Flights of Fancy

When he noticed that the wing of the aeroplane was falling apart, Alan Biengo was not surprised. After all, he had pretty much predicted that it was going to happen. Even so, he was absolutely furious.  But when his skill for predicting calamity on an aeroplane proved more than a little astute, it was to lead him to make a discovery about the nature of flight that was all the more surprising considering how obvious it ought to be... In the final episode of this season of Neurotic Literature, we bring you a story for anyone who is a little bit afraid of flying.

The Call of the Void

'How strange... I was having a most wonderful dream.' When Gillian collapses at her granddaughter's ballet performance, her son Bradley is forced to confront his fears about vulnerability and mortality, still raw from a recent loss. But as doctors puzzle over her condition, Gillian becomes convinced that her deterioration is being caused by something - or someone - far beyond the explanation of medical science. Are her memories playing tricks, or is the voice in her sleep reaching for her - and, perhaps, for the rest of the family? A story about ghosts, whether they be real or imagined...

The End of the War Against Terrorism

Derek Smawk was an easy man to loathe. A squat figure with a pinched face, his track record prior to election had shown him entirely unsuited to the role of a public servant. Lazy, incompetent and a congenital liar, his all-round unattractiveness was matched by a kind of bullish incoherence when he spoke in public, as if he didn't really think his audience merited the effort to make actual sense. He was, if nothing else, an unlikely person ever to be a Prime Minister, lacking as he was in personality or any notable skills.  This was his biggest strength as a politician: being unelectable puts a person in a position of absolutely no responsibility at all, enabling them to make all kinds of promises that need never be tested. In this story, we find out what happens when somebody unelectable unexpectedly gets elected, and their promises suddenly become a little bit significant... (It's just a story, of course - this sort of thing could never really happen, could it?)

What's Ben Most Anxious About Today?

It's the first rule of the internet, isn't it? Be careful what you put out there: once online, it's there for everyone to see, for the rest of eternity. Yet here we all are, spaffing our thoughts all over social media, distributing our photographs whether mundane or indecorous, and generally putting every last bit of our personal lives out there on blogs, vlogs, tweets, tiktoks, snapchats, instas and, er, podcasts. (This is entirely a work of fiction, by the way. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author's imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental. And that goes for all of the other stories on Neurotic Literature, got it?) Probably, too many of us have woken up to discover that the brave, bold post of yesterday evening is the huge error of judgement of the here and now. But for Ben, who perhaps should found a more conventional way to deal with his anxiety (say, counselling, prayer, or good old fashioned repression), an unwise video turns out to be just the first step into an uncertain new world of online celebrity... A story about how one man's therapy turns out to be everyone else's entertainment.

A Mole Tragedy

This is a story about Derek, the mole who didn't like digging. He liked all kinds of other things. Digging just happened to be a thing he did not like. Which might have been fine, except that he was a mole. And being a mole meant that certain things were expected of him. Digging, for example. But Derek was a very obstinate mole. Listen to the whole story to see how that works out for him. (Though there is a small clue in the title.)