What's on your bookshelf?: why have you put pumpkin spice in my grandfather's ashes edition

Hello reader who is also a reader, and welcome back to Booked For The Week - our regular Sunday chat with a selection of cool industry folks about books! Once again, the dastardly autumn breezes have blown my schedule all out of whack, so no cool industry person this week. Instead, here is a short excerpt from another weird story I starting writing, also containing poultry for some reason.

Atop the council manse pokes a lone grey-black spire, scorched gruesome and slanted like a broken finger.

Above the hill that holds the manse the sky cracks forever.

Below the hill that lifts the manse the village sits, chirping like electrical wires with the collective crow of the eighty eight ash-grey roosters that mistake the ever-cracking sky for a never ending dawn.

And no-one who lives their wakes, because no-one who lives there sleeps. It’s the roosters, you see. They never stop crowing, so it’s always time to get out of bed.

If you ask the people who live there why they don’t just get rid of the roosters, they’ll say: Well, it’s not their fault. They’re just doing what roosters do. Crowing at cracked sky.

If you ask them why they’ve never tried to find a way to fix the sky, they’ll just say: Well, it was like that when we got here.

If you ask the roosters why the sky is cracked, they tend to just shit themselves, continuing to crow at what they’re quite certain is a never ending dawn.

As always, let me know what you’re reading below, and let us pray for a return to guest-hood next week. That, or I could just get on top of my emails. Book for now!