I’m looking forward to diving into the crumbling and the haunted this week with Leon Craig.  We’re discussing Leon Craig’s THE DECADENCE. And you the listener picked Leon as one of the rising stars of literature that you wanted me to interview. Have you ever walked past an old abandoned house and wondered what kinds of lives were lived there? Have you ever dared to explore one? Perhaps you wanted to escape and hide in the house. Or perhaps you wanted to use it for something a little more nefarious. Leon Craig, whose previous collection of short stories, PARALLEL HELLS, was also published by Sceptre, is a graduate of the Birkbeck MFA Creative Writing course. Her work has been published by Hazlitt, the Sunday Times, the London Magazine and others and is forthcoming in Nulla magazine and Berlin Babel anthology.   Get exclusive subscriber benefits from the Rippling Pages.  https://patreon.com/RipplingPagesPod?utm_medi Check out the Rippling Pages Bookshop and buy all the books featured on the Rippling Pages: https://uk.bookshop.org/shop/ripplingpagespod Interested in hosting your own podcast? Follow this link and find out how: https://www.podbean.com/ripplingpages  Episode Chapters 1.30 – rising literary stars poll 3.30 – The crumbling haunted house 6.30 – the ensemble cast  7.25 – early hauntings.  10.10 – misunderstandings and humour  11.50 -embracing imperfect characters. 14.25 – secret passageways  16.05 – sexual elements to hauntings.  19.10 – colonial legacies and trespassing 22.55 – Rippling Pages Patreon 24.20 – on beauty   27.00 – getting what we want.  29.50 – desire and disgust  32.00 – The country housegenre 37.15 – Leon’s next novel   Reference Points House of Leaves (2000, Mark Z. Danielewski). Saltburn (2023, dir. Emerald Fennell) Beowulf The Great Gatsby (1925, F.Scott Fitzgerald) White is for Witching(2009, Helen Oyeyemi) Brideshead Revisited (1945, Evelyn Waugh)