The Soul of Sybil Jane Armstrong and other short stories

Abstract

A care home worker learns a dark secret about her favourite resident. A young man with a brain injury desperately tries to warn his small town of impending disaster. A doctor is haunted by a dissatisfied patient. In 1930’s Alabama, a woman sells her soul to the devil to escape an asylum. The Soul of Sybil Jane Armstrong and Other Stories is a meditation on disability, horror, and the monsters we make and are made into by the world around us. This collection maps diverse experiences of disability, caretaking and unruly bodies and minds onto the horror genre, subverting expectations around agency, harm and the monstrous to explore how ableism shapes the things we fear and the things we ignore.

I was inspired to write this collection by my own experiences of disability as a woman with cerebral palsy. Disabled bodies and minds feature heavily in traditional horror stories, from Frankenstein to Friday the 13th, but disabled characters are usually reduced to villains, monsters, or, at best, objects of pity. I sought to expand this framework, highlighting the horror present not in simply existing in a disabled body or mind, but in the navigation of a world designed to be hostile, and, indeed, in the harm which each individual is capable of, regardless of ability.