I Would Haunt You if I Could, short story collection, Undertow Publications, 2021
‘Digging’, short story, in Cōnfingō #20, ed. Nicholas Royle
‘The Medical Room’, short story, in Fictionable, ed. Richard Lea
Fictionable podcast interview & reading
‘Nubbins’, short story, in Interzone Digital, ed. Gareth Jelley, 2023
‘The Window in the Forest’, novelette, Interzone #295 bonus edition, ed Gareth Jelley, 2023
‘Plague Dream’, short story, in Interzone #295, ed. Gareth Jelley, 2023
’A Knock’, short story in ergot, ed. Samuel Moss, 2023
’Three Stories’ (I Shouldn’t Have / A Woman Gives Birth to a Spider / Unwelcoming), short stories in ergot, ed. Samuel Moss, 2023
‘Cold Reading’, short story, in Interzone Digital, ed. Gareth Jelley, 2023
’New to It All’, short story in Best British Short Stories 2022, ed. Nicholas Royle
‘How the Cat Woman Became the Giant Lady, Circa 1995’, short story in The Dark, ed. Clara Madrigano & Sean Wallace, 2022.
‘Hand-Me-Down’, short story in The Year’s Best Dark Fantasy & Horror, ed. Paula Guran, 2022
‘The Last Crisis’, short story in ergot., ed. Samuel M. Moss, 2022
‘Nothing is Wasted’, short story in The Dark, ed. Sean Wallace, 2022
‘New To It All’, short story in Pseudopod, 2022. First published in I Would Haunt You if I Could, Undertow Publications, 2021
‘Funny Faces’, short story in The Dark, ed. Sean Wallace, 2022
'Lucida', short story in Oculus Sinister, ed. CM Muller, 2020
'Dollface', short story in Shadows & Tall Trees Vo. 8, Undertow Publications, 2020
'The Turn', short story in Black Static #74, 2020
Purchase e-book from Smashwords
‘Other Houses’, novelette in Black Static #71, 2019
Purchase e-book from Smashwords
‘Out of the Blue’, novelette in Black Static #64, 2018
Purchase from the publisher
‘Sleeptalk’, short story published by Nerve.com, 2016
Nerve is no more
'Sister' short story in Black Static #31, TTA Press, 2012
Purchase from the publisher
'Okay, Bye,' short story in Litro Magazine, 2011
Read online (membership required).
“Impeccably well written stories of the peculiar and off-kilter, reminiscent of Joyce Carol Oates and Alison Moore. Characters ache and fret in disquieting narratives, blurry at the edges. Many writers of the macabre and fragile psychologies claim to inherit the mantle of Poe, but Birnie earns it in spades.”
— Stephen Volk, writer of Ghostwatch, Afterlife, and the Dark Masters Trilogy
“These are strange, paranoid tales, no less dangerous or jagged for the comic matter-of-fact way in which they are told. Birnie's style is deceptively amiable - he ushers you into his thought experiments cheerfully enough, and then blindsides you with accounts of real love, grief and despair. These stories get right under your skin. They unnerve you. They will indeed haunt you.”
— Robert Shearman, author of We All Hear Stories in the Dark
“The images in Birnie's stories burn themselves in because everything works like clockwork, like a beautiful shutter mechanism: sequencing, sentences, voice. This is a collection which establishes its modus operandi early on and reframes and recaptures it with every story… Birnie is a poet of the bony, paranoid labyrinths of human sensation.”
— Gareth Jelley, ed. Interzone Magazine & host of Intermultiversal
“Filled with thought-provoking, character-driven, psychologically horrific tales that veer slightly and satisfyingly into the weird, this collection is reminiscent of the deeply unsettling and disorienting worlds of Samanta Schweblin and Dan Chaon or the backlist gem Travelers Rest, by Keith Lee Morris.”
— Becky Spratford, Library Journal