Wired

by Julie Morrigan

Wired’, the new collection from Julie Morrigan, contains two short stories, ‘Barbed Wire’ and ‘Razor Wire’. (Each story is over 5,000 words long.)

Barbed Wire
How far would you go to protect your family? Pushed to the brink, Jimmy Mitchell does what he feels is necessary; then, when he finally dares to believe it’s all over, the police knock on his door. Have Jimmy’s past misdeeds caught up with him?

Razor Wire
As Jemma struggles to change her image from thieving tomboy to elegant sophisticate, she is driven to do desperate things to feed her new obsession. What we covet can make us reckless; but is it really worth dying for?


‘Wired’ includes scenes of violence, brutality and human frailty. It’s likely to appeal to fans of previous collections ‘Gone Bad’ and ‘Show No Mercy’.

39 pages, Kindle Edition

First published September 6, 2012

About the author

Julie Morrigan is the author of various novels, novellas and short stories, and best known for her gritty crime tales based in the north-east of England. Her most recent publication is horror novella Blackthorn Cottage, in which evil deeds from over a century earlier affect a family in the present day.

Her most recent novel is gangland novel Flesh and Blood, which follows crime thriller Debt of Honour, both published in 2024.

Gangland novel Cutter features the brutal exploits of vicious Sunderland gangster Gordon Cutter and his criminal firm.

For fans of short stories, Bad Times: North-East Crime collects Julie's shorter tales, originally published in the collections Gone Bad, Show No Mercy and Wired. Many also previously appeared in anthologies and magazines such as Bullet and Out of the Gutter.

Julie shares stories and news via her Substack newsletter, Bad Intent: https://juliemorrigan.substack.com/

Reviews

[Karl Wiggins · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wow! Julie Morrigan doesn’t pull any punches. I stumbled across Morrigan’s novella while looking for …. Well, I don’t really know what I was looking for. British Grit-Lit, I think. And I came across a dozen or so books by her. I figured one of them had to be worth a read so I picked on ‘Wired’ and discovered that the author writes unrestrainedly. Her stories are reckless and ferocious and rash, as if nobody ever told her to write about the gentler topics. I can just imagine Julie joining a writing group who all meet at someone called Fuchsia’s house and drink tea and eat gingerbread biscuits and read out their chosen piece for the week. Geoffrey and Gladys and Gabriel and Gatsby and Gaylord would all have taken their turn, nervous before the group, reading about brooks and rivers and puppies and holidays by the seaside, and then it would be Julie Morrigan’s turn, spontaneously reading a story she scribbled down the night before, justifying why killing someone with razor wire was more favourable than simply shooting them, which is humdrum and mundane and shows a complete lack of imagination in the writer.

Poor old Fuchsia would have nightmares for weeks. This wasn’t why she set up the writing group at all

Julie Morrigan is possibly one of the most frenzied, yet honest, writers out there, and I’ll be reading more of her stuff

[Darren Sant · Rating 5 out of 5]

I’ve been reading Morrigan’s work for some time now and she never disappoints. What you get is gritty adult fiction, yes, with swearing and violence but not overdone and always relevant to the story.

Barbed Wire was a one of those stories where you wait with baited breath for the catastrophe to descend. Even in such a relatively short count I became attached to the little family unit and rooted for them, this is the Morrigan’s craft in character development shining through. A tense tale with a satisfying conclusion.

Razor Wire brings us Jemma struggling to rise above a life of grime. Her dreams and aspirations are ultimately her undoing as we learn from the very start of the tale but how did it come to that point?

An excellent and at times brutal couple of short stories which come across almost cinematically like a Tarantino movie. Excellent Brit Grit from a rising star of the genre.

[Elia · Rating 4 out of 5]

The queen of brit-grit noir returns with another couple of short tales. Julie Morrigan is one of my favorite short story authors and one of my favorite finds since I started on goodreads.

These two tales, take me back to the excellent first collection of "Gone Bad" which made me really step up and take notice. These tales continue that level of quality.

I could use a cliche like it's a breath of fresh air to read these stories, but that'd be lying. The air is stale with cigarette smoke, with the smell of urine, alcohol, and vomit, and a trail of blood that leads the dumpster out back.

There is no sense of refreshment here, these stories make you quiver, squirm, and make you feel sorry for these people. These are doomed people, in a world that's dirty and disgusting. It's perfect noir.

The only sense of relief is that I can keep all this awfulness at arms length and dip in with a voyeuristic sense of giddy only when I want to, not doomed to a lifetime of wire around my body. Fantastic work.

[David Gilchrist · Rating 5 out of 5]

This writer as a thing with wire, two short stories both very well written, somewhat gruesome but compelling never the less. I really enjoyed both stories and look forward to more from this author.