Midnight Call and Other Stories

An artist is summoned to paint the portrait of sinister Mr. Finster in a decaying mansion . . . A suburban couple is vexed by the inveterate lawn-mowing of a ghost . . . In ice-bound Vermont, one farmer's crop is suspiciously bountiful . . . A miniature nymph is found swimming in an office water cooler . . . These are the bizarre conceptions of Jonathan Thomas, a powerful new writer of weird, horrific, and supernatural fiction who introduces himself to the reading public with this rich and varied short story collection. Thomas is, however, a practiced hand at terror-weaving, and his work spans the spectrum from comic fantasy to psychological suspense to science fiction. Unifying all his tales is a prose style of singular fluency and grace, enlivened by keen observation and mordant satire. "Jonathan Thomas has an enviably impressive range-from the gentle to the gruesome, from science fiction through fantasy to the spectral and horrific-but his wit is reliable, and so is the clarity of his eye, and the precision of his prose. He's an asset to all his fields."-Ramsey Campbell. "Thomas's dynamism in plot-weaving and his pungently satirical prose testify to a prodigious fund of creativity and a fine eye for observing the little absurdities of life in the twenty-first century."-From S. T. Joshi's Foreword.

From Publishers Weekly

Readers with a taste for intelligent horror will welcome this collection from the versatile Thomas (Stories from the Big Black House). The longest among the 25 entries, The Weird Old Hole, is a fine traditional horror tale. After the Bicklehams move a steamer trunk in the cellar of their old house, revealing the hole of the story's title, they unwittingly unleash mysterious and ferocious beasts from another dimension. Another standout is Fingers of Stone, about a modern encounter with the legendary Gorgon. Even the shortest piece, the two-page An Office Nymph, manages to pack a wallop. Thomas distinguishes himself with subtlety and careful plotting in a genre in which gore and shock are often the norm. S.T. Joshi provides an appreciative foreword. (Nov.) Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

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