The Hand That Writes Alone, and Other Stories: Psychological Horror and Black Comedy

By Javier Nodras

The Hand That Writes Alone, and Other Stories
Psychological Horror and Black Comedy

A civil servant wakes one morning to find a single toenail missing-and can't stop himself from wanting more to disappear. A boy carries his grandfather's severed head in his lap on a midnight drive. A girl bottles her tears in labeled jars, one bag of ash for every soul she's burned. A dying young man brings his mother breakfast every morning, knowing she no longer remembers whether he's alive or dead.

The Hand That Writes Alone, and Other Stories collects fourteen tales of bodies that betray their owners, families that devour their own, and grief that curdles into something stranger than sorrow. Spanish author Javier Nodras writes with a surgeon's precision and a black, unblinking humor-stories where the absurd and the horrifying share the same breath, and where the line between tenderness and cruelty disappears entirely.

Blending psychological horror with the deadpan comedy of the macabre, this collection is for readers who loved the unsettling intimacy of We Need to Talk About Kevin, the fabulist cruelty of Kelly Link, or the quiet dread of early Cronenberg-stories that get under the skin and stay there.

Now available in English for the first time, in a new translation from the Spanish.

About the Author

Javier Nodras is a Spanish writer, engineer, and economist whose fiction moves fluidly between the tender and the grotesque. His short story collection Ellas, mis u as, y otros relatos won the Premio Internacional de Relatos Villa de Renter a for its title story, and has been praised for its unflinching blend of dark comedy and psychological horror. Nodras is also the author of the poetry collection El zoo ajedrec stico: Poemas de ajedrez para ni os de 9 a 99 a os, a playful exploration of chess through verse for readers young and old. An amateur chess player himself, he lives and writes in Spain.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: B0HJ2HCYCW
• ISBN13: 9798172485916
• Release Date: September 2026
• Publisher: Independently published
• Length: 117 Pages
• Weight: 0.37 lbs.
• Dimensions: 9.0" x 0.3" x 6.0"