David Gaffney – författare

British comedy blended with universal regret, this darkly funny graphic novel, using surreal yet beautiful visions, explores the ways we remain haunted by our ex-lovers.Valerie has a rich interior life. Serially unlucky in love, to feel better she imagines that her previous boyfriends are dead and that their bodies are kept downstairs in the cellar in a strange, mummified state. Every day she brings them upstairs and speaks with them about what went wrong.What follows is a series of peculiar and funny, and sometimes disturbing short tales about inept lovers, weird obsessions, and socially malfunctioning men who repeatedly fail to build a relationship with poor Valerie.Apart from Stanley. Stanley was special.Could he be the one to save her?The Three Rooms in Valerie’s Head is a dark comedy about relationships, memory, loneliness and obsession and is the first collaboration between ultra-short fiction writer David Gaffney and comic artist Dan Berry."Funny, poignant, surreal and still warmly emotional and human, a delight to read." - Forbidden Planet International Blog"It’s a wonderfully offbeat, dark comedic delight." - Comicon.com

Longlisted for The Edge Hill Short Story Prize 2024The countryside – what is it for? A paradise on earth where you can relax and get creative? Or an outdoor wool factory where every other house is an Airbnb and there are fewer trees than Camden. In his new collection of short stories David Gaffney explores the theme of town versus country through a number of different lenses, including his own experience of being brought up in west Cumbria then moving to Manchester. A creative residency on the coast of Scotland becomes weirder and weirder in “The Retreat”; ‘I’ve always had the feeling that the countryside has something against me and that one day it will take its revenge.’ In “The Table”, a recluse in Penrith uses mid-century furniture to lure city dwellers into a world of ‘depressed farmers with shotguns and bottomless pits of slurry that will swallow you so hard you'll never be seen again. And in “The Garages” the pressure of city living forces a man to become oddly obsessed with empty spaces. Often funny, often haunting, often profound, Gaffney uses dark humour and surreal characters to demonstrate a deep understanding of how places, urban or rural, can shape, influence and sometimes distort our lives. ‘People who like the countryside tend to believe in things that aren’t really there,’ says a character in “The Country Pub”. These are indeed stories about things that aren’t really there, and this is why they resonate with you long after you have stopped reading.

David Gaffney’s compact, surreal tales are filled with poignancy and wit. Each story goes off like a tiny depth charge in the mind, leaving you with the trace memory of some new urban myth – comic, absurd and disturbingly true.