Louise Zedda-Sampson

"This collection will make you appreciate all you hold dear, because it is more fragile than you know." -Matt Tighe, multi-award-winning author Are nightmares real - or are they dreams in disguise? The Dreams That Shape Us and Other Stories is a collection of dark speculative fiction and poetry exploring life, death, and the places in between. Ghosts who don't know they're dead, a vampire coming of age, a tree who wants to live a different life, and people - or other things - who yearn for more than they have, unaware life often falls short in its delivery. Within these pages, you'll find a mixture of humour, heartbreak, and horror - stories that reach deep into your soul and beg the question: what if, by some cosmic error, this happened to me?

As long as people have drawn breath, they have pondered the divide between the world of the living and the realm of the dead. From the grief-stricken to the grotesque, the haunting to the humorous, stories about those who have crossed back through the veil between worlds have frightened, inspired, and awed humankind for countless centuries. Featuring poetry and short fiction from 29 Australian and New Zealand authors, this collection begs to ask the question: Is death truly the end?