Fearful Symmetries

The Bram Stoker Award–winning short story collection. “These solidly crafted tales consistently evoke an enjoyably unsettling mood of horror.” —Publishers Weekly   Thomas F. Monteleone displays his mastery of the horror genre in the selected short fiction of Fearful Symmetries, collected works spanning more than twenty years of his career. Revel in the deftly deployed classic horror tropes of these twenty-six stories, from their Lovecraftian monsters and archetypal vampires to Bradbury-esque mysteries and Twilight Zone-type tales.   In “The Night Is Freezing Fast,” a mysterious hitchhiker emerges from a white-out winter storm, following a boy and his grandfather into an ever-more dangerous evening. “Love Letters”—written as a series of letters from a backwoods Pennsylvanian farmer, a private investigator, and an adult pen pal service—subtly instills psychological suspense into the epistolary form. From celebrity-hunting vampires in “Triptych di Amore” to Lovecraftian behemoths in “Yog Sothoth, Superstar,” there’s a skillfully told trope for every horror reader.   With a wry author’s note accompanying each story, and an introduction from the late Rick Hautala, the Bram Stoker Award–winning Fearful Symmetries thrills and disturbs with its twisted tales.  Praise for Thomas F. Monteleone   “Monteleone has a dark imagination, a wicked pen, and the rare ability to convey an evil chill with words.” —Dean Koontz, New York Times–bestselling author   “Tom’s an expert storyteller.” —F. Paul Wilson, author of The Keep and Deep as the Marrow   “A vastly entertaining novel of horror and suspense [that poses] difficult questions about the nature of man, God and the devil.” —Los Angeles Daily News   “The story is irresistible, moving to a mighty climax.” —The New York Times

From Publishers Weekly

The 27 reprints in Monteleone's story collection span the last 22 years and are as much a chronicle of the course horror fiction has taken in that time as they are of the author's career. Several are solid dark fantasies that strive for a subtle sense of unease rooted in the troubled emotions of their characters. In the best of them, "Rehearsals," a Twilight Zone–type memory tale, a man watches his childhood replay itself as a painful stage drama he's desperate to rewrite. "Love Letters" is a skillfully underplayed blend of supernatural horror and psychological suspense, written as an exchange of letters in which one correspondent reveals an increasingly inhuman sensibility. Monteleone (Eyes of the Virgin, etc.) has used virtually every classic horror trope, from vampires in "Triptych di Amore," in which a seductive lamia destroys celebrity artists over the centuries, to Lovecraftian monsters in the tongue-in-cheek "Yog Sothoth, Superstar." Some stories that originally appeared in narrowly defined theme anthologies don't hold up well on their own, while others add little to overly familiar themes. Nevertheless, these solidly crafted tales consistently evoke an enjoyably unsettling mood of horror. FYI:Monteleone's nonfiction collection, The Mothers and Fathers Italian Association (2003), won a Stoker Award. Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

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