SOLITAIRE (2020)

A provincial parish madhouse; an ancient mirror with disturbingly magical properties; an old telephone no longer out of order; an alluring door that disappears and reappears; a radio presenter and his special relationship with his nocturnal audience; inexplicable voices and noises from beyond the grave in the middle of the night; conversations with the dead; a human statue; a suicide survivor; an unfaithful wife; a nervy night watchman; a collector of discarded possessions; an abandoned divorcee.

Several characters in various forms of internal and external confinement, stricken by loneliness when alone and when in company – all of whom seek escape and then find something they weren’t looking for. These unconnected individuals connected by the strange nature of their separate extraordinary experiences tell the unexpected tales comprising Johnny Monroe’s first collection of short stories, ‘Solitaire’.

Whether touring the tortured environs of the Victorian lunatic asylum or blurring the lines between the conscious and the subconscious, ‘Solitaire’ is an unnerving example of how, in alienating the present, we leave it vulnerable to incursions by the darkest emissaries from the past...