The Lord of the Looking Glass

The Lord of the Looking Glass is the first collection of stories by Fiona McGavin and showcases her extraordinary talent for taking genre tropes and turning them around into something completely new. What if the magic mirror owned by the Witch Queen in Snow White could tell its own story? Perhaps there is more than one view to the tale and the spirit trapped in the looking-glass is not always honest.

Throughout this collection, Fiona plays deftly with topsy-turvy relationships between supernatural creatures and people of the real world. ‘Post Garden Centre Blues’ reveals an unusual relationship between taker and taken in a twist of the changeling myth. ‘A Tale from the End of the World’ and ‘He May Grow Roots’ take the reader into Fiona’s developing mythos of a post-apocalyptic world, which is bizarre, Gothic and steampunk all at once. 'Magpie' features a girl scavenging from the dead on a battlefield, whose callous greed invokes a dire curse.  

Following in the tradition of exemplary short story writers like Tanith Lee, Liz Williams and Lisa Tuttle, Fiona has a wonderful imagination and a vivid style of writing that brings intriguing new visions to fantasy, horror and science fiction.