In this striking and bleak, yet luminous debut collection, Nathan
Ballingrud, winner of the inaugural Shirley Jackson Award, uses the
trappings of the Gothic and the uncanny to investigate a distinctly
American landscape: The loneliest and darkest corners of contemporary
life.
Ballingrud's stories are love stories. They're also monster stories.
Sometimes the monsters collected here are vampires or werewolves.
Sometimes they wear the faces of parents, lovers, brothers, or ex-wives,
and sometimes they wear the faces we see in our mirrors. The people in
these stories--ex-cons, single parents, unemployed laborers, kids
seduced by extremism--are stranded by life, driven to desperate acts by
love and a longing for connection. Sometimes they're ruined; sometimes
redeemed. They are always recognizably, wonderfully, and terrifyingly
human. Even at their most monstrous.