I didn’t set out to write about grief. Not directly, anyway. But the stories in Sleep Maps and Signal Ghosts kept pulling me back to that emotional gravity well—the ache of alternate versions of ourselves, the grief we carry not for what happened, but for what didn’t. For what we didn’t allow ourselves to become.
“She Stitched Herself Twice,” the opening story in the collection, haunted me the longest. It started with a closet. A locked one. The kind you avoid in real life, but dream about anyway. Arielle, the story’s tailor protagonist, discovers garments she doesn’t remember making. And each time she puts one on, she lives a different life—an alternate self sewn into silk and memory.
This wasn’t body horror. It was soul horror.
What fascinated me most was this question: how many versions of ourselves do we bury just to survive the one we’re living? And what happens when we meet those versions face to face? Through clothes, memories, or old lovers with baguettes?
This story, and the collection at large, doesn’t offer neat answers. Just mirrors. Just thread.
If you’ve ever stood in your childhood bedroom and mourned a version of yourself you never got to become—these stories are for you.
Official Blurb:
In the city of Avalon, where buildings whisper and grief echoes through rusted speakers, five strangers wander through the surreal architecture of memory, technology, and loss. Sleep Maps and Signal Ghosts is a speculative fiction collection by Seraphine Vale, blending quiet horror, dream logic, and psychological intimacy into five deeply emotional narratives.
A woman inherits a locked closet that unravels alternate versions of her life. A dream-mapping cartographer is stalked by a hotel that builds rooms from her regrets. A washed-up radio host receives a message from his future self—begging him to stop listening. A sound scavenger discovers an audio parasite made of empathy that infects the mind. And two lost souls—one a tailor of grief, the other a broadcaster of ghosts—meet in a dream library that wants to preserve their unfinished selves.. forever. Set in the Duskbound Labyrinth of Avalon, these stories are quiet rebellions against perfection, meditations on identity, and love letters to the flawed and the forgotten. With a lyrical voice and speculative wonder, Seraphine Vale invites you to step sideways through time, touch the seams of your other lives, and decide which version of yourself you want to keep.
7 more days until everything unravels.
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