McHugh’s stories fit very well within the Small Beer Press list, a two-folk team (the incredible Kelly Link, whose stories you have obviously already read avidly, and her husband Gavin J. Grant) one of the most consistently good publishers I can think of. These stories of disasters small and big, personal and/or world-wide, navigate genres picking tools from the literary and speculative according to their needs.

‘Honeymoon’ is one of the least speculative stories of this collection. It starts with a marriage failing from the start – as in the very night of the wedding – and the disappointed bride moving on to do drug trials. It’s a weird story that doesn’t go where you might expect it to, one of those that travels quite a long track and kind of circles back nicely, that make you look in the rear-view mirror to ponder the road taken.

First published in After The Apocalypse, Small Beer Press, 2011