Formats: paperback, ebook, audiobook | Cover design: Daniele Serra | ISBN (ebook): 9781916234741 | Pages: 96 | Published: 28 October 2021

About the Book

Red across black, the blood moon
smeared her lunar cycle across the night
shedding the sky from scarlet to rust.
His garden
awakened

Where Decay Sleeps lays 36 poems on the undertaker’s table, revealing to us the seven stages of decay: pallor mortis, algor mortis, rigor mortis, livor mortis, putrefaction, decomposition and skeletonisation. Readers are summoned to walk the Gothic ruins of monsters, where death and decay lie sleeping.

Tread carefully through Satan’s garden. Feast your eyes on the Le Chateau Viande menu (before your eyes are feasted upon). Read the bios of monsters on Tinder. Discover the unpleasant side effects of a werewolf ’s medication.

Blending traditional Gothic imagery, modern technology and Chinese folklore, Where Decay Sleeps is the debut poetry collection from the haunted mind of Anna Cheung.

About the Author

Anna Cheung is a poet based in Glasgow, Scotland. Her poetry has been published in Dark Eclipse and Dusk and Shiver and by Haunt Publishing and Zarf Poetry. She has a forthcoming publication in Dreich Magazine. Her poem ‘Survival of Solitude’ was included in From Them, To You, an illustrated book by the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland (published by Speculative Books) gifted to breast cancer patients in the UK to help improve women’s body confidence and mental health. Aside from poetry, she has written reviews for Bearded Magazine and Musicovered.

Praise for Where Decay Sleeps

“Where Decay Sleeps is a haunting, visceral, atmospherically disturbing body of work. Cheung captures the unknowingness of death in a way that is true to the present while still paying homage to the gothic writers who’ve come before her. She stakes particular claim in a genre that largely omits women of colour by weaving her rich depictions of East Asian spirituality and mysticism throughout. These poems are fantastically macabre, gruesome and uncomfortably humorous, leaving the reader hungry for more. Think Mary Shelley going to an illegal rave in an abandoned gravesite to find love – that’s this collection!”
Andrés N Ordorica, poet & author of At Least This I Know

“At times unutterably poignant and at times laugh-out-loud hilarious, the songs these poems sing are urgent, make you look at every object around you askew, and leave you full of questions for the world that you might just be a little bit too scared to ask…This is lyric weirdness at its best.”
Heather H. Yeung 楊希蒂, poet & critic, author of On Literary Plasticity

“Where Decay Sleeps is a stark, unsettling and impressive debut from Anna Cheung. Filled with visceral darkness, these poems explore the gruesome mechanics of bodies and society, peeringunder the bed to uncover a world filled with monsters. Cheung’s poetry surgically alters our acceptance of perceived reality, revealing the flesh and bone under the skin. Often chilling, always engaging, Where Decay Sleeps probes an ultimate human fear: the formation, degradation and inevitable loss of self. I recommend reading it with the lights turned on, and the curtains shut.”
Dr Russell Jones, writer & editor

“Anna Cheung’s Where Decay Sleeps is a deliciously gothic assemblage of grotesque bodies, monstrous births, faceless men, ghost-brides, urban legends, all stitched together by a slickly confident debut voice. To encounter these various hauntings and transformations, in old as well as new stories, is to be thrilled and unnerved in the very best of ways.”
Jay G Ying, writer & Co-Founder of the Scottish BAME Writers Network

“Trenchant poetry full of simmering crepuscular charm. Yes, absolutely, to monster tinder, dinner with Dracula, and a zombie disco; yes, even more stridently, when the poems come so deftly sculpted. Like many of my favourite ghosts, these gorgeous poems came creeping back up on me when least expected with their eerie susurrations and occult panache.”
Michael Pedersen, founder of Neu! Reekie!, poet & author of Boy Friends

“Where Decay Sleeps is a collection that revels in the everyday messiness of life, while also taking familiar concepts and characters and turning them into something both unexpected and exquisite.”
sean wai keung, poet & author of sikfan glaschu

“Where Decay Sleeps is a poetic exploration of one of the central paradoxes of horror: the impermanence of the concrete and the (often literally) haunting permanence of the intangible […] Cheung spins these out in settings that are unsettling in their familiarity, whether modern – dating apps, the capitalism of the modern office environment, the Arches in Glasgow – or timeless: the dark forests of folklore that linger in our memories of childhood stories.”
Kelly Kanayama, writer & critic