I Would Haunt You if I Could

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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

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, Write of Ghostwatch, Afterlife, and the Dark Masters Trilogy

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

Reviews of IWHYIIC

'A Collapse of Boundaries', Zachary Gillan, Seize the Press Magazine #10, May 2024

James Grainger, Toronto Star, April 2021

Becky Spratford, Library Journal, April 2021

Alexander Pyles, Horror Tree, March 2021