Plots and Misadventures

Drawn from together from publication in such outlets as Weird Tales, Night Visions and The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Plots and Misadventures is the second collection of short stories from the award-winning author of Valley of Lights, Chimera, and The Kingdom of Bones. Includes Doctor Hood, the novella that inspired the TV series Eleventh Hour, and World Fantasy Award nominee Little Dead Girl Singing. Contents: Little Dead Girl Singing The Back of his Hand Restraint The Plot Doctor Hood Jailbird for Jesus Hunter, Killer My Repeater The Wishing Ball Like Clockwork The Blackwood Oak Endpiece: Nine Horrors and a Dream

From Publishers Weekly

Veteran British horror writer Gallagher (The Kingdom of Bones) shows off his versatility in this collection of 11 stories and a review of Joseph Payne Brennan's Nine Horrors and a Dream. Among the best are The Back of His Hand, a shocking description of the unexpected dangers involved in tattoo removal; The Plot, a Victorian tale in which a mill girl enacts a bizarre revenge on the kindly priest who refuses to let her illegitimate baby be buried in sacred ground; Doctor Hood, a touching ghost story concerning a world-famous physicist, his daughter and the recently deceased loved one haunting their family home; and My Repeater, a grim science fiction story about the fruitlessness of using time travel to correct one's past errors. Capable of being either subtle or blunt depending upon the needs of his plot, Gallagher has assembled a fine and varied collection of weird fiction that should find many admirers. (Oct.) Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From the Inside Flap

If the truth be told the short story is probably the superior form, because there's no getting away with anything. You get it exactly right or it doesn't work at all. Eleven flights of fancy and one true story... but it can be hard to say where fancy ends and the truth begins.In this, his second collection of short fiction, award-winning author and screenwriter Stephen Gallagher delivers his unique take on the weird, the wonderful and the downright strange. These are tales in which the world is very much as we know it, but charged with a sense of the wonders that lie in wait just beneath the surface of our everyday reality.Grisly goings-on in a tattoo parlour A bereaved girl's poetic revenge...Hunting fairies with pickup truck and cattle prod... Along with The Blackwood Oak, a novella making its first appearance between these covers, the stories have been drawn together from sources as diverse as Weird Tales, Subterranean, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Winter Chills, and The Dark.

About the Author

Stoker and World Fantasy Award nominee, winner of British Fantasy and International Horror Guild Awards for his short fiction, Stephen Gallagher has built a career both as a novelist and as a creator of primetime miniseries and episodic television. His fourteen novels include Valley of Lights, Down River, The Spirit Box, and Nightmare, With Angel. The Authentic William James features Sebastian Becker, special investigator to the Lord Chancellor’s Visitor in Lunacy. Becker made his first appearance in The Kingdom of Bones and rose to prominence in The Bedlam Detective.

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