In ‘False Blood’, Will Self recounts his relationship with the needle, from heroin addiction to cancer. ‘The Crab’, as Self refers to the disease, becomes a mythical sea creature, scuttling away with friends and family. His neighbour, also a cancer sufferer, puts his sickness to good use: his thickened blood serves as fertiliser for his pumpkins. Gruesome as this may seem, the real horror in Self’s piece is not blood or death, but expression. Simile becomes a symptom of illness: ‘for does not the fiction-maker engorge himself with the similitude of disparate things? – I had looked feverishly for what my bloody disorder was like.’

Paul Auster’s ‘Your Birthday has Come and Gone’, a memoir, relates the author’s mother and her death. Written in the second person, the reader suffers Auster’s grotesquely dispassionate sense of loss firsthand: ‘yet even after the paramedics have wheeled her out of the apartment in a black body bag, you continue to feel nothing. No tears, no howls of anguish, no grief – just a vague sense of horror growing inside of you.’

Although Granta readers may know what to expect from the publication – political non-fiction, memoir, unconventional fiction – the composition is never formulaic. The ‘Horror’ issue is no exception.