Short Stories to Keep You Wondering

The title of one of the stories, “Possessed” strikes the keynote of the collection, whose characters are possessed by obsessions, visions, aliens, violence, madness, love, death; and, in that keynote story, in a kind of demented self-portrait of the protagonist himself (see “The Murder of Charlotte Master” and “The Spirit of Melancholy”), the character is possessed by the spirit of Edgar Allen Poe. But there is more than the resurrection of Poe here; there is a skillful evocation of unique individuals and particular places in the cities and small towns of the Pacific Northwest and the West, in general. These stories acquaint the reader with some very weird but genuine and clearly-imagined characters in their sense of place, their grit and violence, and their heightened awareness of death, depression and evil. They offer an original blend of Poe, Hitchcock, Mickey Spillane and Rod Serling, with a dash of Flannery O’Connor. Their clear and detailed descriptions of setting and characters root us in reality while their stories take us into extremely bizarre but somehow typical human behavior. As the title promises, they will make you wonder; they will also make you appalled and fascinated and leave you asking for more.

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